


One Lone Candle

by Sirifel



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo is ace/demi and kind of a sub, F/M, Fluff, Force Bond (Star Wars), Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Romance, a very mentally fragile Ben Solo, attempted suicide (sort of), so much fluff and romance, written before tlj
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2018-11-03 22:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 71,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10976988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sirifel/pseuds/Sirifel
Summary: Kylo Ren has renounced his title and destroyed the Supreme Leader at Rey's side, but his own psyche is in tatters after the event. Locked away while the fragments of the Republic argue over what to do with him, Ben would just as soon end his own life. Rey, however, is not so ready to give up on him. When his fate is decided - exile, not death - she follows.





	1. In Ruins He Left

The cell was too bright. The shadows cast here were faint and half-hearted. A dark room would have suited him better. This one was too exposed, too open despite the cramped confines. A smooth, gray, rectangular box, featureless and stagnant but for the door on one end and the flat plane of padded metal that served as a bed on the other. The most complex structure in the room was the toilet in the corner, and even that was minimal. There was nowhere to hide here. Not from anything.

Not from himself.

The brightness was nerve-wracking. The silence was worse.

It was not the physical silence that bothered him. That, in its way, was a relief. His was an isolated cell—the only one on the floor. The special treatment came as no surprise. He neither welcomed it nor resented it. His cell was quiet, but not oppressively so. If he sat still, closed his eyes and measured his breathing, stretched his senses far enough, he could pick out the myriad sounds of the city. Loudest were the humming of engines, the high keen of speeders and the lionine roar of starships. Sometimes there was the drone of a voice projected to a crowd, too distant to make out the words. Nearer, the clatters and pacings of his wardens were almost ceaseless. In the realm of the physical, he was far from alone.

It was his mind that was too empty. There, it felt as if he'd been cut off from something integral, something he had never planned to live without. It felt like losing a limb. Worse than that. Limbs could be replaced.

Snoke was gone.

Ben had never been alone in his thoughts before, and it was stifling.

It was, he imagined, like floating in open space, nothing but a thin environment suit to protect him and no tether, no ship to reel him in. All of his life he had oriented himself by that patient pressure behind his thoughts. There had always been a steady, reassuring voice to fall back on, to seek answers from. It had soothed his doubts, pushed him when he faltered. He couldn't remember a time without it, until he had turned on it and struck it down himself.

In its absence, his mind was ripping itself apart.

It had crept up on him slowly after Snoke's death. There had been too much activity in the aftermath to feel the stillness inside. When he became wholly aware of it, there was no turning back, no forgetting or ignoring it. Not a moment passed when he wasn't scrabbling at the back of his own mind, looking for something to hold onto that wasn't there.

It was driving him surely, steadily mad.

And then Rey came back.

Logically, he told himself, she had been there all along. Only days had passed since the Supreme Leader's fall. He'd gone from the battle to a bacta tank and then straight to his cell. His mother and uncle and all else involved would still be trying to sort out the pieces and make something functional from what was left. He could feel their presence in the Force if he tried, distant and unsatisfying—a pale shadow compared to what he'd known, like the ineffective shadows in his cell. An ember where there should have been a flame.

He'd been locked up for two days, perhaps three, when Rey made her first visit.

She looked well. She was flourishing in victory and in her training. He'd noticed earlier how she had put on weight, no longer the starveling creature he had met in the woods. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair glossy, her clothes unwrinkled and respectable, and he had enough awareness of his own state to know that he was her opposite on all counts. He saw the same acknowledgment in her eyes when she looked at him.

Rey was guarded with her emotions, wary, but no more so than usual. She had never been afraid to show her outrage or her surprise in a heated moment, nor to enthuse in a gesture of kindness or a victory, but neither did she let such indulgences rule her. Even genuine emotion could be used as a tool, and Rey knew that. Ben knew that about her.

It was one of the things that made her beautiful.

When Rey was let into his cell, her face was closed, but that only lasted until the door shut behind her. When she took in the sight of him hunched against the wall, a ragged splotch in the pristine grayness of the room, she allowed shock to flood her eyes, then pity, and then something that resembled disappointment.

"The guard said you weren't eating."

Ben saw no point in confirming that. The untouched tray of food by the door did the work for him. His wardens had been replacing it at every meal, and Ben had been dutifully ignoring it.

"If you're trying to kill yourself, there are less painful ways."

She would know, he supposed, but the pain of hunger had yet to match the blinding numbness in his head.

Rey poked around the room, noting the unused cot, the clean set of clothes folded atop it. Her eyes flickered back to him, sidelong. "Everyone's worried about you."

He doubted that.

"Well," she corrected herself as if he'd spoken, "mostly people think you're plotting against us. It's just Luke and General Leia, really... They're trying to get you pardoned."

He wanted to be pleased by that, but the sentiment fell flat. Of course they hadn't given up on him. He could have held a saber to their throats and they would still be spouting words of forgiveness.

"They want me to thank you." This she said more quietly. Reluctantly, perhaps. "We wouldn't have beaten Snoke without you."

Ben coiled in on himself, cringing at the mention of it. Though she had spoken softly, the echo of it slammed around the inner walls of his skull like a bell's toll. Why had he killed Snoke? He knew the answer, rationally. He would have done it again if he had to, but if he'd had the fortune of foresight, he would have struck himself down as soon as his master was dealt with. It would have been easier that way.

Rey waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot, but Ben had no intention of speaking. When time made that clear, she went to pick up the tray of food. "If you're not going to eat this, can I have it?"

Ben didn't answer. He watched her, she looked back at him, and then she sat down against the opposite wall and took his silence as permission.

The meal was nothing special—a roll of bread and some sort of mash that looked like casserole—but Rey's eyes lit up before she'd even tasted it. He expected her to wolf it down quickly, as an underfed animal would, but he was wrong. She drew out every bite, savoring the prison meal as if it were a royal feast. Ben caught himself begrudging her the simple pleasure. It wasn't the food he envied her for, but the ability to enjoy it.

Rey washed the food down with the tin cup of water that had been sent with it. Then, curiously, she pushed the cup across the floor and left it sitting by his feet. Ben watched her stand. She took the tray with her. "I'll come back tomorrow. You should try the bread next time." And with that oddly casual farewell, she left him.

When the door was closed and locked, Ben peered over his knees at the cup she had left on the floor. It was still half full.

.

The next time she came, he was barely aware of it. He had been caught in that space between sleep and waking. The sound of the door was like a dream. Her footsteps seemed too distant to come from the tiny confines of his cell. It was only her presence in the Force that convinced him otherwise.

He would have cursed her for the intrusion if he had the will to speak. As his mind realigned itself with reality, he became torturously aware of his pinched gut and cramping muscles. He hadn't moved since the last time she'd been there, except to drink the water she had left. His neck and shoulders had joined his stomach in the game of intermittently screaming at him and going numb, and to add the requisite insult to the injury, one of his feet had gone to sleep.

As before, Rey's attention fell on the untouched meal. She picked up the bread without asking this time, tore it apart and put half back on the tray. Then, tray in one hand and bread in the other, she reclaimed her spot on the far wall and chewed for a while.

"Leia thinks I should try to read your mind," she said eventually, "the way you did to me." She let that sink in while she tasted the other item on the tray—today, a brownish stew. "They're all arguing over what to do with you. Nobody knows if we can trust you."

He thought about asking if she trusted him. She wanted to, that much was clear. He thought about asking why she bothered at all. It seemed a waste of effort.

Rey ate a carefully divided half of the meal and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "I'm not gonna force myself into your head."

He found he was surprised by that, and then found himself amused by the thought. He knew what Rey was capable of. Having the moral high ground didn't mean a person was above cruelty. Rey could have chosen to invade his mind for the sake of saving him and no one would have questioned her, nor would he have blamed her for it. Even so ungentle an effort was more than he deserved.

But Rey had her own codes, and while she could be vicious, she was not unneededly so.

"You can let me in if you want," she concluded. "It's up to you."

The offer startled him, though the only outward sign he gave was a blink. He had perceived her previous words as a dismissal. It was hard to imagine that Rey would want to touch his mind again—not without an incentive as heavy as the fate of the galaxy to drive her. He remembered too clearly her tear-stricken face on Starkiller Base. The image bloomed behind his eyes in damning detail and his breath caught in his throat. He didn't know whether it was out of horror at his own actions or out of shame.

He wouldn't have given himself another chance had he been in Rey's shoes, but here she was doing just that.

He did not answer her with words. He let her wonder and wait while he grounded himself, or tried his best to. It was tenuous. He didn't know how long he could hold it, but he was half way into the act before he knew what he was doing, so he plowed on. The thread of thought he threw her way was clumsy and not as gentle as he had meant it to be, but Rey didn't flinch away. She latched onto it willingly and fed it with her own strength. When he faltered, she pulled the thread tight. Once she had her grip on him, he didn't think he would be able to break the link if he tried.

And once she had him, why would he want to?

Rey was a flame in the dark. When he looked at her, he was blind to all else. With her in his mind and he in hers, he felt, for the first time since Snoke's fall, unbroken.

She followed the thread into his thoughts, prodding at each that came to the surface. Their eyes met, but he was seeing more than her face. Though he did not push or pry, it was a two-way road, and her passing thoughts flitted by as clearly as if she wore them on her skin. She was divided. That much he'd guessed already. She wanted to believe that his change of heart was genuine, but she had been lied to before.

More than that, and to his chagrin, she was worried about him. It hurt her to see him this way, half-starved and hopeless. Ben understood basic human sympathy, but she seemed to have an overabundance of it. No matter what had passed between them in his... moments of weakness before and after Snoke’s fall, he didn't think he had earned her compassion. Aiding her in the final stand couldn't possibly have made up for the things he had taken from her.

It was not his intention to probe—far from it—but his tired and wandering mind pressed questions against her consciousness before he could stop himself. Why care? Why now? Why _him?_

Her defense was reflex. The door slammed shut between their minds and he was left reeling.

"This isn't about me."

It was, but he didn't argue. He couldn't. Instead, he caught his breath, head bowed, eyes closed, and then, apologetically, he reached out again.

She accepted the apology. She caught him up and reforged the link, leaving him all but sighing at the relief of it. To have someone else share his thoughts—to have direction, if only for a moment...

He laid himself bare as Rey's awareness washed over him, coming on like a wave, scouring, seeping into the cracks. He submitted to it with hardly a thought. Snoke had done this often and far less gently. Submitting was easy.

"You're lonely." He felt her flinch after the words were said, acknowledging the echo of the first time they had done this. He saw the trace of memory before she clamped down on it—saw it from her perspective this time, and felt his gut twist. He wondered if she would retreat again. He braced for it, but she steeled herself and forged on.

"You've... never been alone in your mind before. Snoke was always there. You..." She stopped. He watched her brow furrow and her lips draw back, a wild animal baring its teeth. The picture of her mind seemed to ripple, disturbed. "It's like flying in a storm."

Ben felt himself tense. She was dragging it to the surface. She didn't mean to, but she was. Each crack and chasm in his psyche, each broken piece, glass shards scattered without a purpose. His breath came shuddering and hers matched it. This was too much. This wasn't supposed to happen with her here. The hole in him ached. The loose, jagged pieces whirled inside his mind, cutting, and his efforts to catch them and stop them were useless. He might as well have been catching mist. Rey pulled out too late as Ben pressed his hands to his temples and curled in on himself.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." She reached again, tried to help, but she didn't know what she was doing. He slapped her away with a thought before she could lose herself in the wreck of his mind. She'd been right to compare it to a storm, but he wasn't flying. He had no control here. The engines were dead and he was a slave to the winds.

He was only dimly aware of Rey leaving, and only because it sent another jolt of aloneness through him. He couldn't blame her for going without a farewell. He wouldn't blame her if she never came back. He was probably as terrifying now as he had been when he called himself Kylo Ren.

What he did not expect was for Rey to reappear moments later with a presence he knew better than even her.

Luke must have been waiting in the hall, and Ben too focused on Rey to notice. His uncle stepped into the cell and straight into the storm of Ben's mind. There was no asking permission. Ben tried only feebly, only automatically to fight him. Luke overpowered him as one would swat a fly, and then slammed a wall down between Ben's center of self and the hurricane that assaulted it. The storm raged on, but he was apart from it now. He could catch his breath and regain his mental footing, as long as Luke took pity on him.

"You used to be better at shielding," his old master said gruffly. "We'll work on it."

Ben stared up at him, comprehending but not believing. He didn't speak, and Luke didn't confirm the implication, but nor did he appear contemptuous. It was... something. It was a start, but Ben didn't have the nerve to entertain further hopes. It was far, far too wild a fancy to begin wondering what he would do with himself if they could somehow put it all behind them. He was not an optimist. It was easier to expect execution for his crimes, or lifelong imprisonment. The former would be preferable. His mother deserved better than to live with the burden he had become. His uncle deserved to move on, to focus on a new apprentice...

And Rey...

Rey shone as bright as a star, but she was walking the edge of a chasm. She danced along it, and sometimes she stumbled. He'd seen that in her too. Rey deserved a life in the light. Rey deserved an even path. What could Ben possibly be to her but an ungainly weight, fouling her steps?

Luke was still looking at him intensely. Ben wondered if he’d been projecting his thoughts. His uncle said nothing of it, however, and only gave Rey a vague pat on the shoulder as he left the cell.

Alone with each other again, Rey watched Ben warily a while before she moved to her spot across from him. She dropped into a squat, not quite willing, perhaps, to commit to sitting back down. Ben shut his eyes and wondered how long she meant to stay.

"I wasn't trying to hurt you."

He didn't answer.

"Maybe what I saw will help." There was something of desperation in her voice, subtle, but straining. "Snoke was using you. He manipulated you. That's what Leia keeps telling everyone. Nobody believes her because she's your mother. She's right, though. I saw it."

Ben wanted to ask her if she thought they would believe in Jedi mind tricks any more than they believed the biased plea of a mother. Speaking aloud still seemed an insurmountable task, though, and the question went unspoken.

Rey lingered, but she didn't eat anymore of his food, and she didn't chatter. Perhaps his own silence was finally deterring her. She stood eventually and went to the door, only to pause and look back down at the meal tray. "If you pass out from hunger, they'll probably throw you back in the bacta tank and wire you up with a feeding tube."

Ben didn't let her see his frown, but she had a point. He waited until she was gone, and then he took a deep, slow breath and reached for the torn piece of bread.

.

The third time Rey came, he didn't rouse. After Luke's terse visit, he had spent more time asleep than awake, catching up while he had the chance. The shield his uncle had erected was still in place, but it eroded steadily. It would be gone by the next day, or faster if he prodded at it, and he lacked the strength to shore it up. He had another day of rest, at best, before the storm returned.

When he woke in the radiance of Rey's presence, he couldn't have guessed how long she had been there. She was sitting on his unused bed, engrossed in a datapad. Her eyes flicked up when he stirred, but didn't linger. She chose to read a while longer instead, presumably waiting to find a good stopping point before she gave him her full attention. Heavy minutes passed before she set the pad aside. "... The guard said you ate a little. Did you like the bread? I'll leave it all for you today, if you want."

Ben regarded her for the span of a few heartbeats, then dragged today's meal nearer and shoved it in her direction. He could feel her scrutinizing him, but apathy and shame kept his gaze to the floor.

Rey stooped and retrieved the roll, tearing it in half as she had done the day before. Ben bullied himself into playing along, pulling the tray back and taking what was left for him. He cast his eyes on the opposite wall and forced his jaw to work, though the bread tasted like ash.

"Leia said you loved bread when you were little. She said it was all she could get you to eat."

So his mother was sharing embarrassing stories about him. As small as it was compared to everything else, he managed to find that annoying.

"The guards won't let me bring you any outside food. I thought maybe there'd be something you'd want to eat more. Your mother said she'd cook all your favorites if we get you out of here."

"She can't cook."

Rey froze. Ben risked a sidelong glance to see her mouth hanging open. It was almost satisfying. "A droid cooked for us." He winced at the roughness in his throat, sandpapery from disuse.

"... Oh."

"Why are you doing this?" His tone sounded accusatory to his own ears, more than he had meant it to be.

"Doing what? Making you eat?"

"Helping me."

"You helped me." She made it sound simple.

Ben didn't have enough fight left in him to counter that. He would have argued that he had hurt her, and she would have pointed out the marks she had left on him. She hardly needed to. Even now, the scar on his face tingled numbly. "You should have killed me."

"Yeah, I hear doing things like that can lead to the Dark Side."

Her blithe tone might have made him smile on a better day. "Did your master tell you that?" It was becoming harder, not easier to speak. He picked up the cup of water and drank.

"No. You did."

Oh. He didn't remember saying it, but she was probably right.

"The council's still arguing about what to do with you." She told him this around a mouthful of bread. "Most of them didn't take my word because I'm not fully trained. Or because they don't believe in the Force." She sounded bitter. "I levitated a chair."

"Did that convince them?"

The skin around her nose pulled tight, forming a network of tiny wrinkles. It was fascinating to watch. "Didn't seem like it."

"The fortitude to sit on councils tends not to breed flexibility." His voice cracked on the last word and he coughed. The water wasn't helping much.

"Your mother sits on the council."

"Yes."

Rey wisely did not argue with that. "She wants to see you, you know."

"Then why isn't she here?"

Rey chewed the last of her bread, thinking before she replied. "She's trying to give you space. She thinks you hate her."

The words stung, but he had earned them. "Is that what she confided in you?"

"She talks about you a lot."

Despite the evidence she had already provided of that, he found it hard to picture. He thought his mother would have wanted to forget him. She should have given up on him when he left—she and Han both. Then he would never—

He wouldn't have had to...

Ben tried to banish the thought. "I don't hate her."

"Good. I'll tell her you said so."

She was waiting for a response, but he had worn out his patience for conversation. He pulled his knees up, crossed his arms over them, and buried his face in the shelter he'd made of himself. Maybe she would take the hint.

Rey waited. After a while, he heard the tap of fingers on her datapad. She stayed a long time, unmoving, reading, or pretending to read. When she did eventually leave, she took her light with her.

.

She did not come back the next day, though he'd left most of his bread for her. Two bites were all he had been able to handle before his stomach recoiled. Luke's shield had degraded to nothing and Ben was once again left vulnerable in the tatters of his mind.

He counted the meals. The first came and went. The second came, and when it was taken, marking the end of the day, he asked about Rey.

"She and Master Skywalker left on an assignment." The guard was a woman, burly, dark of skin and light of hair. She was the same guard who brought and retrieved all of his meals.

"How long?" The intensity of his own voice alarmed him. He wasn't that desperate, was he? He couldn't afford to be, if he was fated to be killed or locked away for life. He told himself it was the disruption of routine that upset him. He had nothing else here to look forward to, after all.

"I wasn't told." She took the tray. She didn't wait for a response.

It was just as well. Ben didn't know what he would have said. Rey hadn't told him she was going. Why would she? She didn't owe him the courtesy. She liked to talk, but she wasn't the sort to spill information without need. Certainly not in his presence, at any rate. Perhaps she hadn't known at all. The task that took her away might have been assigned only after her visit. He nearly called the guard back to ask, but despite all his fretting, he couldn't quite muster the motivation.

Gingerly— _stars,_ his muscles ached—he moved to lie down on the floor. He had spent a night or two like this, when he didn't pass out sitting up. The three paces to the cot seemed too much trouble. He hadn't even needed to get up and use what passed for a 'fresher in the cell. He hadn't eaten enough, and his body was using all the water he would give it.

A rarely voiced rational part of his mind mused on how childish he was acting. Childishly, he dismissed it. In retaliation, that part of his mind went to speculate on how his mother would scold him if she saw him like this. Former Senator Leia Organa-Solo, while perfectly capable of drama herself, was not known for having patience with it in others. The thought didn't make him smile, but it conjured the memory of smiling.

Where had it gone wrong?

With Snoke, obviously. He couldn't remember the first time he had heard Snoke's voice. He'd been too young. Snoke had been his comfort when his parents fought, his companion when the rest of the world filled with shouting and tears. Snoke had been there in the good times too, reminding him how fragile, how temporary it was. How easily those smiles turned to annoyance, and then to anger. When the next time his world fell apart—and there always was a next time—Snoke would be there for him. Snoke would protect him. Snoke would guide him when his mother was too busy and his father wasn't there. Ben couldn't rely on either of them, but at least he had Snoke.

It was only later, after Ben was sent away to stay with his uncle, that Snoke began asking for things in return.

In his cell, Ben quailed at the memory.

He had been used, cruelly, and the worst of it was that he had known. He had seen what Snoke was doing to him, but he had thought that he didn't have a choice. He had thought, in his youthful overconfidence, that he could take what he needed from Snoke and be able to defend himself when the Supreme Leader tired of him. It wasn't as if he could go to Luke for help, or to his mother. They would be killed if they interfered. Snoke had assured him of that.

Kylo Ren had embraced the Dark Side because it was his only option, the only strength he had. Fighting it would have been futile and costly. That was what Snoke had taught him. If he accepted the Darkness, if he made himself its master rather that its enemy, then—and only then—could he master his own life.

By the time he came to realize that the Dark Side could never be mastered, he was in too deep to turn back.

And still, in spite of all that, it had been Ben who chose his own path. He couldn't place all the blame on Snoke. A stronger man would have refused the Darkness regardless of consequence. Luke would have sacrificed himself and everyone he loved for the sake of the galaxy. Leia likely would have done the same. Ben had been weak, and now he suffered for it, as others had suffered by his hands. The Force exacted harsher punishment than any mortal court would.

The shrieking whirl of his mind raged on an indeterminate while, spiced with remorse, until slowly, imperceptively, it dissipated into the familiar void. Somewhere between one state and the other—he couldn't place the moment—conscious thought and memory turned to dreams.


	2. Hands Clasped in a Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there. Thank you so much for the kind words on Chapter 1. They made my week.  
> I started writing this fic almost a year ago. It is outlined for three parts, with most of part 1 finished. All I'm doing is some final editing before I transfer each chapter here. I will aim for twice-a-week updates until I've caught up.  
> If you review, I will squeal in joy and probably read it aloud to myself.  
> Once again, thank you.  
> 

  
What nightmares he had, they did not last, nor did they linger in memory, burned away by the discomfort of waking. The throb in his limbs could have been blamed on his own self-neglect, but the hot pressure behind his eyes was new. The spikes of dizziness were more pronounced, and accompanied now by spikes of pain. He craned his head in search of water and found he had woken before his first meal. A surge of despair stilled his lungs and left him blinking back tears, frustrated with his own reaction. It was only water. He'd live until it came or die and be done with all this. There was no sense in weeping.

Ben pressed his aching skull to the floor and tried to will himself back to sleep. Nightmares would be preferable to the monotonous torture of wakefulness. Sleep, under normal circumstances, was not a thing that came easily or often, but this time it sucked him down as eagerly as it had so often eluded him. This time his dreams were vivid, memories of battle and pain and lives ended by the flash of a saber. Victories that felt like surrenders, one after another, faces and deathstrokes jumbled as if they had all been a single event. It went on and on until he wanted to scream at his dream-foes, to tell them to run, to throw his lightsaber aside just to make the cycle stop. He would have turned his blade on himself, but couldn't. The dream forbade it. He could sense the uselessness of it before he tried.

When next he woke, it was with a jolt, heart thudding rudely against his ribs. He could still feel his father's hand on his face.

"Shhh. Lie down."

The hand was not his father's, but it was just as familiar. He knew it as surely he knew that voice. Fingers moved from his face to press against his chest, urging him back down, and he obeyed.

Even in stillness, the dizziness persisted. It took a valiant effort to see past it and register the change in his surroundings. He had not been removed from his cell, still boxed in by the same gray walls, but the surface beneath him was soft and giving, warmer than the floor. Someone had moved him to his cot while he slept. Ben blanched at his own carelessness, then remebered that it didn’t matter. If it had been an assassin come to finish him off, he would have welcomed it.

Something cold touched his forehead. His senses told him that it had been there before, dislodged, probably, by his waking. It was a waste of effort to treat him, he thought, but he lacked the strength to argue. His mother would not have listened anyway. He remembered many such battles over fevers and bed rest when he was a child.

"You brought this on yourself." Her voice was as grave and weary as her brother's. Even so, some instinctive part of him reacted—some remnant ghost of childhood not yet lost. His breath came deeper. The tension in his chest eased. His head lulled. His mother's voice was an empty promise, but he let it soothe him, if only for the moment.

"Not eating. Sleeping on the floor. I didn't know anyone could be more stubborn than your father."

He knew one person more stubborn than Han Solo. She was sitting at his bedside.

"They've already had a medical droid in here. I don't know if you noticed." He hadn't. "The fever's not serious, but you need to eat. I don't know why you're doing this to yourself." Surely she did, though. She must. He squeezed his eyes tight as she dabbed at his face with the coldpack. "I'm still working on the council. They're not going to kill you. Not unless they go through me." There was nothing humorous about the words, and nothing false. Her staunch determination was palpable. It crackled in the air around her and infused each breath she drew, laced each word she spoke. Ben hated it.

This was wrong. She shouldn't forgive him. She shouldn't even try. His eyes stung behind closed lids and a different sort of tension grew inside him—a small, hard knot that made him grimace and turn away from her. He pressed his face into the padding of the cot to spare her the sight of his tears. His shoulders shook once before he clamped down on that too, but not fast enough. They had betrayed him. He could feel the solemn recognition in her, a heavy settling in the Force. He felt her lean forward, felt her hand on his shoulder, felt the breath she held back, saved for words that did not come. What could she have said? Words were pebbles thrown at the brick wall of the past.

Leia must have reached the same conclusion. He felt her draw away. He thought that she would give up and leave altogether, but instead, with a gentleness that made him wince, she put her hand on his head and curled her fingers through his hair. Delicately, painstakingly, she began to work out the tangles. Ben couldn't move. All he could do was struggle to keep his breath even. He was embarrassed, suddenly, by the fact that he hadn't shaved in days, let alone bathed. It was a small, laughable, pathetic matter, but he hated for his mother to see him like this.

The General did not speak again, but she stayed until her job was done. She could have asked for a brush or a comb to use. There was a guard in the room with them, and it would have made the task go faster. That, he supposed, was why she didn't.

He dozed off again under her ministrations, though he would blame it on the fever. Her departure roused him for a little while and he lay half-aware, wondering if the whole encounter had been delirium.

When his dreams returned a third time, they were kaleidoscopic and meaningless.

.

The guard, when she brought his next meal, went to the effort of shaking him awake—a questionable courtesy he'd not been shown before. When he sat up, dazed, she retreated with a brusque comment about making sure he ate it hot. "General's orders."

On the tray, beside the cup and the customary roll of bread, was a bowl. Steam rose from it in curls and the meaty fragrance conjured daggers in his stomach. He staggered off the cot and sat down hard on the floor, slopping broth over the sides of the bowl in his hurry to pick it up. What hadn't spilled, he gulped down, refusing to think about why. A measure of it went the wrong way, searing, but it was only liquid and the coughing fit passed. The discomfort was nothing to the abatement of hunger. Ben found, in those fleeting moments of sheer physical relief, that he had a new sympathy for Rey. Starving himself had been his own doing, but to live like this without choice, for years... Her tempered perserverance had been forged there, he was sure of it.

He wiped his mouth on his dirty sleeve—not something that was his habit, but perhaps an unintended mimicry of the girl in his thoughts. Thinking of Rey had renewed the pangs of loneliness. Sating one hunger made way for the other. He put the bowl back on the tray and sat where he was, ruminating at an empty space in the air before him.

He wanted her back.

If they wouldn't let him die, then he wanted her near him, near enough to fill that haunted, empty space—to bleach it out with her light. The strength of his own desire was alarming. He had no right—far from it— but oh, how he wanted. He _ached_ with it. It didn't matter if she never touched him, never spoke to him again. To have her nearby would be enough, he told himself. They were a match in the Force. They resonated in a way even Snoke had never been able to replicate. Rey knew it. He'd shown it to her. He'd tried to use it to turn her. She _must_ have felt it too. If only they had met under different circumstances... If only he had been wiser from the start. If only he had listened... There were so many times he should have listened...

Why hadn't he listened?

It was with a sigh that he dragged himself away from that line of thought. Daydreaming about her was worse than not. There was only so much solace one could gain from pining over might-have-beens, and the hollowness that followed was a bitter price to pay. Despair was a thing he was used to. Despair he knew how to cope with. Hope and desire were a greater cruelty. Desire and hope for something he could not have, did not deserve? For something he had likely ruined all chance of… The only kindness that could give him would be to stop his heart.

.

He spent another day and night in brooding lamentation, his fever forgotten before it passed. The void left by his slain master was a dull, stone-like weight. The roles had reversed. Now it was Snoke's absence that reminded him of Rey.

He ate mechanically, forced himself to sleep on his cot, but his anguish had taken on a nervous tone—the sense of missing a chance, not in the past, but now—right now. The sense that if only he were out there and not locked in his cell, he could do something about it.

It smoldered in him until he lurched to his feet and paced, three long strides one way and three the other, until pacing wasn't enough and in one fierce sweep he snatched up his meal tray and flung it against the wall. It clattered raucously, but it did not satisfy, and there was nothing else to express himself with. Picking the tray up to throw it again would have been ridiculous even by his own standards.

He sat down and counted his breaths. Later, when he was able, he bullied himself into a fretful nap.

.

The beacon, when it came, was like a newborn star, lancing golden-white across his inner skies. His breath clung in his throat. His eyes locked on the door minutes before it opened. She'd come back. She'd come back for him. She could not have been on the planet long or he would have felt her sooner. She'd returned from her assignment and come straight to him. Why?

His chest swelled with a feeling he dared not name.

When he saw her, all his desperate excitement crashed inward.

There was a ragged, weary look about her where there had been vivaciousness before. There were shadows under her eyes and a scabbed cut on her brow. As relieved as he was by her presence, Ben struggled with the mad urge to scold her. Why hadn't she rested before coming to him? She didn't owe him that much. The Resistance was plainly pushing her too hard. Just because she'd saved their lives a few times, they must have thought they could rely on her to solve all their problems. It was typical, predictable, and pathetic. His hands fisted. His palms itched for a lightsaber. The gray walls would look better with a few molten streaks of red, he thought—a feeble stand-in for whoever had done this to Rey.

Rey, for her part, was frowning down at him. Her furrowed brow pulled at the scab on her forehead, revealing a trace of pink scarring underneath. Had she not even asked for a bacta patch? Hadn't anyone offered one to her?

"The guard said you've been eating more." Her tone was cautious, moreso than the question deserved. She was testing his mood, not his appetite.

He didn't feel like playing games. "Where did they send you?"

"One of the Knights of Ren was still alive." Her answer chilled him. "Not strong enough in the Force to match a Jedi, but he was giving the Resistance fighters trouble."

"Where is he now?" Spiny, ice-cold fingers were digging into his heart and creeping up his throat, turning his words into a growl. He made no effort to mask it.

"I killed him." She said it stoically, almost blandly, but he could feel the unease she was trying not to show.

"Was this Luke's idea of training?" That she'd had to fight one of his, and been injured... It made his blood boil. It made him want to shout, but he had no target deserving of his fury. There was only Rey.

"It wasn't training." She was getting snippish. That was his fault too.

"The Republic is short on Jedi," he scoffed, "so they send an apprentice into needless danger." He was glaring at her, but he was seeing the dregs of the broken Republic in her place, foolhardy and headstrong and useless as ever.

"I beat you," she pointed out.

Ben ran a hand over his face, pressing his fingertips into the scar. Habit and a short temper inclined him to keep bantering, but a cold, lonely feeling in his gut warned him against it. The last thing he wanted was to make her his enemy.

He had never wanted that.

Exhaling harshly, he dropped his gaze and the argument with it.

Rey didn't let the silence last. "Why do you care about me?"

Ben hesitated, searching her with his eyes, but it was not for lack of an answer. It was that he had too many. Some of them he had yet to find words for. Others he refused to admit, even to himself. He settled for a half-answer, and one that she already knew. "I made a mistake." He'd made several, but she would get the point.

It was Rey's turn to linger over a response. He watched her lips part and her breath stall, but the words were slow to come. "... What will you do if they let you out of here?"

"They should kill me."

"Why?" There was a sharp-edged aggression to her tone. "Will you become Kylo Ren again if they let you go?"

He was not going to dignify that second question with an answer. "People will want recompense."

"Snoke is dead," she said this dismissively, as if that were the end of it. "Compared to him, why should they care what happens to you?"

"Why should they bother to let me go?" He tried to echo her tone. His voice was raw, though, and it crackled shamefully over the words. "Wouldn't it be better to contain the threat?"

"The Republic needs Force users."

Ah, and there was the kick. Again it came down to his power. His ability. He should have known. They didn't want to forgive him. This wasn't about justice. They only needed him for what he could do. They wanted to use him like they were using Rey. At the bottom line, the Republic wanted him for the same reason that Snoke had wanted him.

And the bitterest part was that he owed them. How could he claim to regret his actions but refuse to serve the people he had wronged? He should agree whole-heartedly to whatever they asked. He should throw himself at the Republic's feet. He should burn himself out repairing the damage he'd done. That would be fair. That would even, perhaps, sooth some of his guilt.

But it wasn't what he wanted. It wasn't a life he had any desire to live, and he despised himself for his own selfishness.

Rey startled when his fist hit the floor. His knuckles tingled, then throbbed, but the pain helped him center himself. "I've been used before. It's not something I care to repeat."

"Your mother doesn't want to use you. Luke doesn't."

"Luke wants me alive to ease his own guilt." It stung to say it, but he didn't think he was wrong. He had always been a burden to Luke. Always. Uncle or not, how could the man love him? Undoubtedly Luke wanted to save him for Leia's sake, but that was not the same.

There was truth to the old sentiment; only a mother could love a monster.

Her master was one of Rey's weaknesses. He knew that. He'd used it against her before. He had not meant to use it now, but her eyes flashed with familiar fire all the same. "Is that something Snoke told you?"

"No." But was it, though? He doubted himself, suddenly. Snoke had been speaking to him for as long as he could remember. How much of that vile whispering had passed unnoticed? How much had been heard only by his subconscious? How many of his thoughts and beliefs had not belonged to him at all? Ben hung his head, bared his teeth at the floor. The storm was rousing again. He wanted to shout at Rey for bringing it back. She was supposed to be his salvation, but here she was torturing him as surely as he did himself. Did she not realize that?

He wanted to Force the door open and throw her out. He could imagine what it would feel like, that sudden release, the hard satisfaction of using his power. He could have done it with a sweep of his hand. He wouldn't even have to stand up. It was a measure of his mother's trust or the Republic's ignorance that he had been placed in this cell to begin with. He could have left any time he wanted.

That trust, however, held true, at least for the time being. He did none of those things. They would have accomplished nothing but a momentary relief, and barely even that. He would antagonize Rey, which he reminded himself was counter-productive. She would leave him or she would stay and shout him down, and either way the storm would rage.

"You're shaking," she told him as if he hadn't noticed. He felt her reach out, felt her brush the edges of him and then draw back. He couldn't be certain, after the fact, if it had been her hand that touched him or her mind. "Should I get Luke?"

"No." He didn't want to see Luke. He didn't want Luke to see him. He was still reeling from the question she had raised, the reminder of a thousand other questions... Everything he had made of himself was from Snoke, Snoke's teaching, Snoke's poison. He didn't know who he was without it. Everything he believed, every thought he'd had since he was a child...

He remembered his first day with Snoke, suddenly. Vividly. His first real day, after leaving Luke. He remembered the despair and the sick anger, the darkness and the restraint and the panic. He felt again the nausea of deluding himself, and knowing it, and knowing it was the only choice he had.

Rey crouched down in front of him. He saw the cast of her shadow on the floor and heard the sigh of her breath. "Can I help?"

It was difficult to breathe again. "No."

She tried anyway, and he didn't have the focus to shut her out. He was mentally spreadeagled, drawn and quartered by the conflict between memories and self-taught lies. Snoke was not responsible for every falsity that had paved the way to Kylo Ren. That was the conundrum of it. Snoke had given him the bases on which to built, and had done so generously, but it was Ben's traitorous imagination that had filled those lies with substance.

He knew this. Logically, he knew, but he had lived under those lies for so long, done so much in their name, and taken shelter in their comforting sharpness. The lies and Snoke were the same. Without them, he wasn't suited to live. He didn't know how. Without them, his burned out husk of a heart was laid bare to the elements. Like an animal with its skin burned off, it would fester and die.

The walls of the cell were groaning. The joints that fused the cot to the wall creaked, then bent sharply, rendering the bed at a broken diagonal. Ben's eyes opened wide and found Rey's staring back at him. The storm was no longer inside him.

He had lost control before, but not often, and not without Snoke. For the first few heartbeats, he was paralyzed, caught in the spell of her wide eyes. Then a cold fear spurred him and he pulled the energy back on himself, in and away from Rey, as much as he could take.

The pain was not merely an inner turmoil. This was real and crushing, a vice on his head, a choking thickness in the air. This was the Force, wild and dark and turned back on its user. It was a blessing that he had no fear of death. If he were forced to crack his own skull in order to save Rey, he would do it, only let it come quickly—

What happened next was like watching a dawn break over the horizon, a single spark that grew into a blinding, fiery radiance. Rey's newborn sun had become a supernova. It sliced into the uncontrolled darkness and sundered it, sending it spinning off in useless threads of smoke.

Faster than it had started, it was over.

Ben clutched his head and tried to breathe. It came as a mixed comfort that Rey looked as winded as he was. "I'm sorry," he gasped out. "I wasn't..."

She waved off the apology, but if she were going to answer, it was interrupted by the door opening and the guard barging in. It was a man this time, and his expression upon seeing the damage was almost comical.

Rey surging off the floor to put herself in front of Ben was not.

Ben could only gather enough strength to hold his head up and watch.

"What happened?"

"He didn't mean to! He lost control..." She sounded frantic and fierce. "He's not well, and I don't think keeping him in here is helping."

"It's not my decision to make, ma'am."

She was balling her fists, his unlikely defender. Ben's heart was beating too fast. "I know, it's just... He needs help."

"Well, believe me, I hope he gets it." The guard was plainly trying to diffuse the situation. Ben couldn't blame him. He had a firecracker in the shape of a girl on his hands, and she looked perfectly willing to burn him. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"I'm _fine!_ He protected me. I told you, he's not going to hurt anyone. Not on purpose. Except himself."

Ben wasn't sure what to think of her defense as it continued. She hadn't sounded like this when she spoke to him. She had sounded restrained. Conflicted. He'd assumed it was a struggle to be kind to him now that she didn't need his help anymore. Where was this intensity coming from?

"Alright. Do you need me to call the General? Or... your master?"

Rey exhaled slowly, taking measures to regain her composure. "No. Not yet. Let me talk to him first."

The guard took another look around the cell. Lastly, he let his stare linger on Ben. He seemed to think that he could see right through him—a task better left to Rey.

When the door was shut and Ben was sure he wasn't going to faint or lose control again, he took a quick, shaky breath and demanded, "how did you do that?"

"Do what? Talk the guard down?"

"No, the..." He waved a hand at the room, impatient. "How did you stop it?"

She looked at him like he was an idiot. "I used the Light."

Ben could have snarled at the vagueness of her reply. Trust Rey to be difficult when it mattered. "I know that, but how?"

"I don't know, I just did!" She had no trouble paying back his waspishness in kind. "Ask Luke."

He shook his head. He didn't meet her eyes. "Luke's never taught... anything like that to me."

"Well, maybe you left too soon."

"Maybe he doesn't know everything." He'd meant to snap at her again, but it came out flat. He was too drained to keep fighting.

Predictably, she picked up on that. Rey had a knack for reading the moods of others. "Maybe we should stop arguing." He dared a glance upward, but she was looking around the cell now, searching. "I guess I came too late for a snack."

His lips twitched in a not-smile. Trust the scavenger to always think of food. "It won't be long. You can wait if you want to." He straightened his spine, crossed his legs, breathed deep, assuming a long-ingrained meditation posture. He was afraid of how Rey would respond to the offer. She had every right to leave. It was a relief when she sat down instead, claiming her usual spot.

"We should try that again."

"What?" he asked. "Arguing?"

Rey rolled her eyes. "No. The Light thing."

He made his face deceptively bland, ignoring the pounding ache in his skull. "I would prefer not to repeat the experience."

"Not right now. Later. Maybe with Luke. It would be useful if you keep... having fits, or whatever it is that's happening to you." Her tone was gentle, sensitive, and that made it worse. It was disgusting to be so helpless.

Ben had nothing else to say and Rey fidgeted in the silence, tugging at a corner of her shirt, then coiling a strand of her own hair around her fingers. He wondered how she had survived the monotony of desert life, as restless as she was.

The fact of the matter, if he let himself think about it, was that it was terrifying to wonder what might change if Rey mastered her Light trick—if she could control the storm, or chase it away for good. It was one of those dangerously hopeful things he would do better not to think about.

.

Rey was absent again the next day, and no one came to fix his bed. The latter shouldn't have bothered him. He was accustomed to sleeping on the floor, but his head still hurt and it put him in a mood to be petulant. He spent a good deal of the day glowering at the closed door.

When the distraction of annoyance wore thin, it was loneliness that set back in. He knew Rey hadn't left the planet. He could feel her. She wasn't far, so why didn't she come? Had he pushed her too much? Had she changed her mind?

The question nagged him until he could think of nothing else, and neither did he want to. Her distance had him tense and fraying. He felt as if she'd strung a thread between them and pulled it too tight. Finally, when the thread felt near to snapping, he threw caution to the wind and  _reached..._

His mental fingertips brushed the edge of her awareness. She reacted with a questioning thought, then mild surprise, and then a tiny breath of reassurance. He didn't ask her to complete the connection. He merely waited. It was of her own initiative that she caught him up and drew him closer, holding on loosely as one might hook their fingers around another's. He leaned on the link, basking in its rare, easy comfort. He had only the vaguest sense of her surroundings, but he could see Rey clearly in his mind. He could imagine himself standing beside her, though it was a pitiful indulgence and it embarrassed him. By some wonder, still, she allowed it.

She was giving him only a fragment of her attention, but it was enough. Wherever she was, she was listening to someone talk, or several someones. He could not hear what she heard, but he could pick up an impression of her thoughts. She was thinking about fairness, about forgiveness, and about him.

He let himself drift, holding her hand through the Force and dwelling in that singular place, apart from his own world of troubles. It was the nearest he'd felt to peace in a long, long time.

Then, too soon, she let him go.

.

He was in the middle of meditating, or trying to, when the door hissed open. It was too early for his next meal, and it wasn't Rey. Instead, two of his usual guards stomped in and hauled him to his feet. The only explanation offered was a curt "time to go", and Ben couldn't form the words to ask where. His mind was blossoming with images of trial and execution. He stumbled as he was pulled ungently through the door, making a frantic effort to keep his footing. He would rather walk to his fate than be dragged. At least if the attitude of the guards was anything to go by, it would not take long.

A short, upward elevator ride gave him a chance to catch his breath. Then he was marched, not into a court room or a council chamber as he might have expected, but out onto a small docking platform.

The first thing he saw there was Rey. Rey standing in sunlight, dressed in jacket and boots and travel bag. Luke was a gray sentinel beside her, and the bulk of the Millennium Falcon served as their shadow. Ben wasn't given much time to wonder about the purpose of this gathering. Rey was already stepping forward, halting the guards by the expedient act of standing in their way.

"Did they tell you what's going on?" Her concern bewildered him, despite that she had shown him the same since Snoke's defeat. He mumbled an indistinct negative and she plowed into rapid explanation. "They held the trial without you. You've been exiled. We're going to Ahch-To."

"And let's not wait around for them to change their minds," Luke added grimly.

Rey's focus snapped to Ben's escort while he tried to find his bearings. "Are you the guards assigned to us?"

The one holding his left arm answered. It was the woman who had brought him his meals. "Yes ma'am. I'm Lieutenant Brell. That's Classen."

"Leia said she was going to hand-pick you..."

"She did, ma'am," the lieutenant assured her. "And she told me to tell you not to worry. Neither of us plans on assassinating the General's son under your nose... though he looks like he could manage it on his own, just about." She gave Ben a shake, not violent, but unexpected enough to make him stagger.

"Luke thinks we can help him," said Rey, and let that statement serve as the order to board. She turned and scaled the ramp in quick strides. The guards followed, maneuvering Ben between them, but he spotted Luke dawdling behind. The old man was acting as if distracted, or as if he were looking for something. Ben had the briefest chance to crane his head around and follow his uncle's gaze. Somehow, he knew already what he would see.

On a balcony above them stood a figure, staring down, hands tight on the rail, diminutive and gray-haired and tense.

Ben had a fragment of a moment to meet his mother's eyes before he was pulled aboard the Falcon.


	3. On the Rain-Soaked Shore

His father's ship was quiet in the same way his cell had been. Little was said, and the air hung heavy with what was not. Ben was given free range of the main hold under the watchful eye of his guards. He had expected to be cornered somewhere less comfortable and more claustrophobic. It was hard to believe that he would be trusted with any amount of freedom, no matter what Rey and his mother had told the council. He took advantage of that freedom by finding a single spot to sit and staying there unmoving until Brell got fed up enough to fetch him a cup of water.

His uncle meandered in not long after the ship had left atmosphere. At first he seemed to ignore Ben, making himself something to eat and exchanging a few words with the guards about their itinerary. He sat and ate his snack without hurry. Only afterwards did he come to stand in front of his nephew, looking down at him blandly until Ben raised his head.

"Do you need me to block it out again?" He frowned and answered his own question while Ben was still processing it. "No. It's not as bad today. You'll need to learn to cope without help sooner or later." His gaze slid to the cup in Ben's hands. "Drink that. Rey won't like it if you die of dehydration." Luke walked off then without waiting for a response, and Ben grudgingly sipped the water.

The trip passed without further conversation, save for one incident in which the male guard handed him a powered shaving razor and suggested he tidy up. Ben found it easier to obey than not. The guard didn't threaten or force, but even unspoken disapproval was exhausting.

Inside the tiny fresher, he was granted his privacy. With the guard outside, it became another cell, but he found he didn't mind. It was a relief not to be watched, though he hadn't realized it was bothering him until he had a moment without it. He lingered longer than he meant to, taking advantage of the sonic shower and trying not to delve too deeply into memories. The ghost of his childhood was on this ship. His father had tried to teach him everything about it, every wire and relay and secret hold. Han had wanted his son to love the Falcon as much as he did. Han hadn’t known then about the poison in Ben's mind, turning him bitter, telling him that his father loved the ship more than he loved his son.

Ben emerged clean and shaven, handed the razor back, and returned to the precise spot in which he had been sitting before. The exasperated look shared over his head by the guards was almost satisfying.

.

Ahch-To looked the way he had left it. The damage done by himself and his knights was still there, but Rey and Luke paid it no mind. Most of the architecture remained in liveable condition... if, that was, one were inclined to live in a dirt-floored stone hut.

Master and student looked relaxed and at home as soon as they disembarked, leaving Ben faltering in the sunlight and his guards apparently content to stand and do their job regardless of location.

There was one other person who had accompanied them, though Ben had not seen him during the flight. Naturally, Chewbacca had chosen to co-pilot with Rey, remaining in the cockpit throughout the trip, but when the wookiee came down the ramp and passed him without a glance, Ben could no longer pretend that the avoidance was accidental.

So be it, then. He would have been a fool to expect otherwise.

Rey had vanished inside the nearest hut, but she popped back out a moment later with a spring in her step. "Ben, help me carry supplies. Or...." She hesitated, eyeing him up and down. "If you're not feeling well, you can rest..."

"I can help." He hadn't planned on offering. The words leapt off his tongue without consent, spurred by pride and a need to please her that left him vaguely disgusted with himself. It was, at least, a better option than standing around feeling aimless.

He let Rey lead him back aboard the Falcon and direct him to the crates that needed moving. He managed four trips between the ship and the delegated storage hut before his poorly treated body forced him to stop. Winded and abruptly weak-kneed, he was obliged to sit down. Between Chewie and Rey and the guards, however, he had done his fair share of the work. He wasn't sure whether or not to be pleased with that fact.

Rey regarded his condition without blame, but she hadn't broken a sweat. "I'm going to help Luke make dinner. Classen has the supply list if you need anything."

Ben didn't answer, so she left him there. The flagstones outside the storage hut were cold, even through his clothing. Luke's island was always cold—just enough so to be uncomfortable without being dangerous, unless one were especially foolish or trying hard. Drowning would be the quicker option if he felt like making an attempt. That or throwing himself off a cliff. His guards had probably been warned to keep him away from either, but they weren't Force sensitive. He could overpower them if the need arose.

It was not a plan he felt any strong desire to act on—not yet. It was a comfort, simply, to know what his options were.

What he wanted to do was lie down, but the stones were unforgiving and to ask for a blanket wasn’t worth the effort or the embarrassment. He sat instead and tried his best to meditate. That was something he could still manage if he was careful, if he kept his focus outward, and not in.

He began by listening, as he had in his cell, stretching his awareness to each sound, identifying its source and its location, moving on, farther and farther until he was riding the wind and the waves. From there, he used a different sense, following the siren call of power until he could see the lines of the Force as they flowed over the island. He mapped the pools and eddies, the surges and the steady streams. There were no stagnant places here, no dark corners left to fester. This had been a place of the Jedi long before Luke came. The purity of the Force here had been cultivated over centuries, over millennia. Perhaps longer, even, than the Jedi had gone by that name.

By the time Rey called him in to eat, his erratic sleep cycle was catching up with him and the island's steady pulse had lulled him into a doze. It was earlier in the day here than it had been on… whatever planet they had left. The sun was offensively bright and cheerful in spite of the chill, more than it had any right to be on a planet with the climate of Ahch-To. The hut where they ate, in contrast, was dimly lit and comfortably warm. It was home to a clay and metal oven and a single, long table, too low to the ground for chairs. They sat instead with legs folded on the dirt floor. The guards ate with them, but Chewbacca was absent. Had he been here, the tension might have helped keep Ben awake, but it would have made the meal harder to stomach.

As it was, he found his eyelids drooping the moment he sat down. Rey called his name twice during the meal when he began to nod off. The third time, she took his plate. "Come on. Let's pick out where you're going to sleep."

Despite the long day, Rey was nearly bouncing as she led him around the maze of stone structures. She moved as if she could find her way with her eyes closed, while Ben struggled to keep his open. It was hard to make sense of the sights they passed. His eyes wouldn't focus and it all looked flat, like watching images on a screen. The air was too full of light and the smell of the sea too sharp. Sleep deprived as he was, it might have been a dream. He was beginning to wonder if he had left his cell at all.

The hut Rey beckoned him into was one of the larger ones. A single driftwood end-table sat opposite the door, out of place on the barren floor. A round hole in the wall above it served as a window. The eclectic arrangement only added to Ben's suspicion that he was imagining this.

"I like this one," Rey announced. "Luke and I are in the big one across the path." She gestured vaguely behind her. "You can have one farther away if you want, but they're all smaller."

"This is fine." Even as one of the biggest huts, it had less floor space than the cell he’d left, but it didn't matter. He just wanted somewhere to lie down.

"I'll bring you some blankets." She squeezed out past the stoic pair of guards. Ben had heard them following, but hadn't expended the energy to acknowledge them. He didn't now. He sat down on the dusty floor and thought of nothing at all.

Rey came back bearing an armload of blankets and enlisted one of the guards to help her make a pallet, laying it out along the wall to the right of the door. It made for a simplistic, primitive sort of living space. Island hermit was hardly much better than war prisoner, as far as roles went, but at least it was a change of scenery.

At least Rey was there.

He waited until she and the guards had stepped outside before he folded over onto the makeshift bed and fell out of the world...

And into _fire._

It was Starkiller Base, crumbling, consumed by its own monstrous strength. Then it was Ahch-To, dying in the same sunfire. The island burst open and burned as Ben ran, aimless, hopeless of escaping, until all the world was torn away and he was somewhere new, and it was happening again.

This time he didn't run. There was a ship nearby—a way out. He knew this with that strange omniscience that came sometimes in dreams. He could get away in time if he ran, but there was something else he had to do.

Rey was beside him.

He knew their surroundings, though he had never seen them before in his life. The nightmare was not so unkind, it seemed, as to leave him lost. Here was the temple, ancient and stone, kind and welcoming to its new tenants after lying abandoned for so long. Below was the wood, older still and vibrant, full of memory and ghosts.

But now the trees were burning. Now the temple stones cracked, shivering apart and raining dust and more upon them. They would be crushed before they burned, but he couldn't leave the temple. There was still more to do.

_"Ben."_

He thought it was Rey speaking, but her back was to him. The ceiling was caving in around her, bruising and bloodying her, but she didn't move. She didn’t even flinch.

_"Not here, Ben."_

He whirled on the spot, seeking the speaker, but there was no one else. The destruction around him should have drowned out all other sound, and yet—

_"Leave this place."_

He was going to shout that he couldn't leave, not yet, but then the temple was gone and Rey was gone and he stood in a field of white.

He was not alone.

The figure was nondescript, pale blue all over and too hazy to discern height or shape or gender.

None of that mattered. "Where is Rey?"

_"That was a dream."_

The words were coming straight into his head. He was hearing them in his own voice, as one hears one's thoughts, but they were not his. It sent a shiver up his spine and laced iron bands around his stomach. He had far too much experience with being spoken to like this.

"What happened?" He was balling a fist at his side as if he held a lightsaber. Then, because he willed it, he did. "Is she alive?"

_"Yes."_

The crackle of the crimson blade gave him a sense of renewed confidence. "Who are you?"

 _"Exactly who you want me to be."_ There was an unwanted taste of humor in the figure's words. _"Now, you should probably wake up. That dream is no place to go back to."_

He opened his mouth to protest, but the featureless white plain was gone and he was in his hut, sore from lying on the thin pallet. The figure had departed with the dream.

Only a dull, hazy light seeped into the hut from outside. He thought he had woken before dawn, but rather than growing brighter, the sky blackened, giving way to beads of light and nebulic traceries. He reminded himself of the time displacement between this planet and the one they'd left. He had gone to sleep well before sunset, and woken just after. He sat for a long while on the stone path outside his hut, measuring the wheel of the stars. Eventually, hours later, he was able to go back in and steal a little more sleep, and he did not dream.

.

In the morning, at Rey's suggestion, he helped her move one of the storage crates into his hut. There were fresh clothes and blankets inside, along with a kit of grooming tools. That came just in time, as his hair had descended rapidly back into chaos. Rey had the nerve to giggle when he picked up the brush. He didn't ask her why.

His guards had taken up residence in the two huts nearest his. They were trading shifts to watch his door, one or the other always there to follow when he ventured out. Their adaptability and Rey's undaunted optimism renewed the phantasmal quality of the day before. It all felt too easy. It felt like sitting back and watching a holovid, everything happening beyond his control.

Breakfast was a hot cereal mash, thoughtful in the morning chill. As before, Chewbacca was the only one missing from the table. Ben wondered if he was keeping himself to the Falcon, or simply staying out of sight in one of the other huts. He would have been able to answer that question if he looked hard enough through the Force, but it wasn't his place to intrude.

"When you feel ready," Luke said into the silence, "we will decide where to pick up your training."

Ben glanced at Rey, and then at Luke. His uncle wasn't looking at either of them. He could have been speaking to Rey, but... no. Ben knew better. In spite of his doubts and whatever resentment Luke still held, it was the only thing that made sense. There was no other reason why he should have been exiled to a planet like Ahch-To, nor why Luke would accompany him. Rey had said herself that the Republic wanted him for his power. He was a danger unless Luke could teach him control. If that were accomplished, he would make a valuable tool.

And then, before he could sink too far into bitterness, Rey threw him off by asking chipperly, "we'll be working on lightsaber forms?"

Ben's stomach flipped uncomfortably as he questioned his own predictions. Had Luke been speaking to Rey after all?

"When Ben is ready," Luke answered. "He's a much better match for you than I am."

And with that, it fell into place. It should have been obvious from the start, but his muddled brain was slowing him down. He would be Rey's training partner. It was what Snoke had intended as well, but he couldn't bring himself to care. For a moment, he almost smiled.

Rey nudged him with her elbow and he stared at her, startled by the physical contact.

"You better eat. You know I can beat you on a good day."

"We've never fought on a good day," he murmured.

She was barely restraining a grin. "We will."

He tried not to look at her. He was still thrown off by her ease around him. He should have been glad of the kindness, but he did not understand what was prompting it, nor how quickly it would fade. Surely when she stopped feeling sorry for him, she would remember what he was and what he had done to her. Surely this couldn't last.

These thoughts did nothing to help his appetite, and the meal sat heavy in his stomach. He bullied himself into a few more bites and then put his bowl down. "Luke... Is there somewhere I can meditate?" That, he thought, was a reasonable request and would please his uncle.

The old Jedi stood. "I'll show you."

.

It was a garden Luke brought him to, pleasantly sheltered within a round stone wall. Much of the plantlife looked edible, though he suspected the grander, leafier varieties were only there for appearance and shade. Then again, herbalism was not his area of expertise. The trees might have been fruit-bearing, or their roots or bark edible. He would likely find out if he stayed on Ahch-To long enough.

There was a cobbled path winding between the garden plots, newer than the island's other walkways. It looked as if Luke had built it himself. Midway along the path, where it curved near the wall, there was a sea-bleached wooden bench that reminded Ben of the tiny table back in his hut.

Luke had stopped near the entrance, saying nothing. Taking this as a cue, Ben went to the bench and sat down, resting his hands on his knees and letting his head bow. He heard Luke turn and leave, heard the guard who had followed him shift and stand still. He heard the wind lapping at the leaves and the sea lapping at the rocky shore. He heard Rey's voice rise in the distance, finding its way to him through the maze of stone. He heard someone answer her—the other guard.

He let it all turn to white noise.

The Force pooled here, attracted by the growing things. It wasn't visible, nor physical, and it made no sound, but he could see, touch, and hear it all the same. It saturated the earth, flowing through the flora as water flowed. It laced itself up the old stone walls like vines, or veins, joining and splitting and rejoining and weaving its web across every stretch of creation. He could feel it in his own skin, like liquid soaking through a cloth, but he knew better than to follow those rivulets. There were wells of darkness in him that could overflow at a touch.

Instead, he tracked the traceries through the wall, then down along the old stone paths, where the flow of the Force had been shaped by centuries of walking feet. He dipped farther, sinking into the rocky ground, down and down until he felt the Force bowl outward in a vast hollowness—an underground cavern, perhaps, or a lake. He wondered if it was the island's source of fresh water.

He confirmed it by finding a place where the Force wove itself around a well. He didn't linger there, but let the Force pull him where it willed, as the flow of water pulled the Force. He rode it out to sea where it fanned and flourished and carried the purity of the island across that great expanse. Luke's island was a heart, taking in, enriching, and redistributing the energies of the planet. It was not mere chance that had led the Jedi to settle and build here so long ago.

The twin tides of sea and Force sought to bear him away, seductive, but he drew back before they could take hold. He was too at odds to ground himself against a lure of such magnitude. There was temptation in losing himself. There were no worries out there in that endless current, and no guilt. He could leave his tattered body and his broken mind and drift as one with the Force, unfettered, but if he did that, he doubted he would ever come back.

Ben extracted himself from the planet’s energies with delicacy, a bit at a time, but the return to his body still left him hollow. He was at loose ends in his exile. He had not allowed himself to plan for a future after Snoke's fall, and so he had no clue what to do with the facsimile freedom he was granted. Being asked to serve the Republic might have been preferable after all, bitter as the idea was. At least the activity would have been a distraction.

Then again, given what Rey had said, that was likely the intent.

He wasn't sure how to feel about that. The idea made him tense and antsy, and he couldn't say whether that was due to the Republic's hypothetical presumptiveness or to his own self-doubt. If anyone expected a full rehabilitation out of him, he thought it likely they would be met with disappointment.

Brooding was a step down from meditation. Ben didn't have the patience for it anymore. He surged to his feet and stalked out of the garden with a bluster that left his guard wide-eyed and hurrying to keep up.

He spotted Luke outside the cooking hut, washing pots and bowls in a wooden pail. The Falcon had more efficient utilities on board, but Luke seemed to enjoy doing things the hard way. Ben entertained a memory of camping with his uncle during his early training, the conditions more primitive even than Ahch-To. It had been a useful lesson in survival skills, if nothing else.

On the subject of survival skills... "Uncle, you said you would help me with my shielding."

Luke gave him a long, bovine stare. In the silence, Ben realized his slip.

"Luke..." It was too late to avoid the awkward moment, but Luke only stared at him a little longer and then went back to scrubbing.

"Find Rey," he said when Ben was sure he wouldn't speak at all. "Meet me outside your hut."

"Do you know where she is?"

Luke kept his eyes on his work. "The Falcon."

Ben nearly grimaced. Asking Luke for a favor was difficult enough. If he ran into Chewbacca while looking for Rey...

There was nothing for it, however. What else was he to do but go back and brood in the garden until the situation forced itself upon him? Tempting, but pointless, and how would he explain himself? Back in his cell, he had been convinced that he had no pride left—that it was thoroughly, irrevocably crushed out of him. It came as an honest surprise to find it stirring in him now.

Perhaps he would get lucky and Chewbacca wouldn't be there...

Or perhaps there was another way.

He left Luke to his washing and went in the direction of the Falcon, or more precisely, in the direction of the storage hut. There he stopped, hidden by its domed wall, and turned his thoughts back to the Force.

It was easy to find her. There was only a stretch of field and a weathered hull between them. He could have found her on the far side of the planet if he had to.

He skated across the hard shell of her mind, penetrating only enough to send a simple message—a beckoning, and a trace back to his location. He felt her go on alert, felt her shields come up, but he also felt her curiosity. She would come.

Ben drew back and waited, meeting the wary eyes of his guard with a flat stare.

He could hear Rey when she approached. There was the hollow thud of her boots on the loading ramp, then the softer shush as she crossed the dewy grass. He realized only belatedly that he was not hearing these things with his own ears. He had closed off his link to her, but she was prying it back open. The poorly stifled anxiety he felt was hers, not his own.

Even with her in his head, he still managed to be startled when she cam zooming around the side of the hut and put herself in his face. She didn't look worried. She looked furious.

"Don't _do_ that! I thought... I didn't... You could've _asked_ first." She growled like a nexu with its tail pulled. "I don't like you barging into my head without permission."

Ah. That was where his mistake had been. Understanding settled like a stone in his gut and he scrambled for an excuse. "Luke asked me to find you. I apologize. I didn't think." That came out more smoothly than he had hoped it would. He mentally congratulated himself while Rey frowned at him.

"What does Luke want?"

He managed to smile through his endless, dragging weariness. "He's ready to resume our training."

.

When Luke had instructed them to meet at Ben's hut, Ben had envisioned them working inside. It was not the most ideal location, but it made sense enough, so he was thrown when Luke saw them coming and turned on his heel, saying simply, "follow."

Down the grassy slopes their path wound, tucking itself snakelike between the terraced stone huts. Now and then, Ben caught glimpses of the oblong cooking lodge on the ledge above them. Their course formed a half-circle around it, hidden from view of the Falcon's ledge and his own hut, and ending at the entrance to an open space. There was a wall here much like the garden's, but inside it had been cleared of grass. A circle of sand, several paces across, was Ben's first clue that this was more than just a meditation ground. His second was the ancient, weather-worn racks along the wall. Most of them were empty, but one was host to three identically pale wooden practice blades.

"We're not going to..."

He didn’t finish, but Luke anticipated the thought. "No. Not yet. You're not ready."

His uncle's choice of words stung, but Ben kept his mouth shut. Luke wasn’t waiting for a response. He sat down in the center of the ring, leaving Rey and Ben to follow suit.

"We will practice your shielding, Ben, and your control, but first I want to see this technique Rey mentioned."

"The Light thing?" Rey asked.

"Yes, the Light thing." Luke sounded put-upon by his student's irreverence, but there was something in his eyes that Ben recognized—a sharpness, a falsity. His exasperation with Rey was an act, or at least an exaggeration. Perhaps he hadn't lost all sense of humor, despite the damage Ben had done.

"I'm not really sure what I did."

"Try," Luke advised.

Rey turned to face Ben, straightening her posture, closing her eyes. She gathered the Force around her, funneling it in, becoming the center of a slow whirlpool. This she took and wove and compressed into a pulsating ball of energy, held it tight to her center and suffused it with her own inner Light.

It was mesmerizing.

This was gentler, more peaceful than the fire that had scorch away the storm in his prison cell. The spell it cast over him was of stillness and serenity. He basked in it, desperate for that fleeting grace. He found himself breathing in time with her, felt the Force throb with her heartbeat. For one infinite moment, they were as two arms of the galaxy, turning together, aware of nothing outside of each other and an entire universe within.

Then Rey's breath fell out of sync, her eyes fluttered open, and the Light faded away.

Ben had to steady himself and blink to clear his vision, flushing at the sting of moisture in his eyes. Rey’s lips were pursed in disappointment, but not for the same reason.

"That wasn't it." She was gesturing and trying to explain something to Luke, but Ben was slow to process her words. The separation had hurt him on a deeper level he had expected. He felt destabilized, dizzy, and the world around him had returned to its flat and dreamlike state.

"What was it like before?" Luke asked Rey.

"Ben was in danger. I was trying to protect him. It was like holding onto fire. Like a sun…"

“It was a weapon," Ben managed, after a small delay.

"But he was not in danger today," concluded Luke. “The Force became what you needed then, as it did now. I suspect, should you need to use it as a weapon again, it will tailor itself to the situation."

"Is it really that simple?" Rey asked.

Infuriatingly, Luke shrugged. "I don't know." Rey opened her mouth to protest, but he held up his hand. "You have an affinity for the Light. I've told you this before, but I haven't explained. From what I understand, it's something not many Jedi could claim."

Ben watched the way Rey's eyes narrowed. The expression cast furrows in the skin above her nose. "I thought all Jedi used the Light."

"The Jedi taught control," Luke corrected. Ben vaguely remembered this lecture. "They strove to use the Force for good, but the Force itself is neutral. Light and Dark are... flavors. They are extremes. An action can be good or evil without drawing on either side. Likewise, the Light can be used to do harm and the Dark Side—with great care—can do good... although you would not have heard that from a Jedi.” He added that last part wryly.

"You were a Jedi." Rey narrowed her eyes as if she thought she had caught him at something.

Luke’s expression remained bland. "I never was.”

Ben looked at Rey. He expected her to look betrayed, or at least surprised by this information, but she looked only as if she were puzzling something out. “You said it was time for the Jedi to end—that their teachings had been their downfall, but you defeated the Empire with their teachings.”

“I used what was available to me. That didn’t make me a Jedi.”

"I didn't call myself a Sith," Ben pointed out, low, wanting to defend Rey’s point. "I still used the Dark Side." And he certainly hadn't done any good with it.

"Did Snoke have you follow the Sith Code?" Luke asked.

"No, I... No." He had been aware of the code. He had studied much about the Sith, but he had never lived as one. Kylo Ren had been Snoke's servant. The Supreme Leader had plied him with minions to command and the promise of strength, but never with total mastery. Snoke had not been willing to submit to the Sith tradition of replacing master with student. According to him, the Sith Code was careless frivolity.

Kylo Ren, in all fairness, had had other plans for his destiny, but that was beside the point.

"The Jedi and the Sith were factions," Luke said. "They defined themselves by the Light and the Darkness, order and chaos, but those things are not defined by them. The right way to use the Force is not bound by written rules."

"If the Light is so hard to use, then why is the Dark so easy?" Rey asked.

Ben knew the answer to that question. "Because building something is harder than destroying it. Control is harder than release."

"That's not why." They both looked at Luke. "Not quite."

"That's what you taught me." He kept his voice low, but the accusation was there, and he made sure Luke heard it.

"Yes, well," Luke paid back his nephew’s aggression with a flat stare. "I didn't know everything back then, did I?"

Ben looked away.

"The Light Side and the Dark... they're not good or evil," Luke reiterated. "You are right in that one requires control and the other release... with exceptions. The Force is like an ocean. You may float on the surface or sink to the bottom. There is power and mystery in the darkness below, but it will consume you."

"Like drowning," Rey said. Ben resisted the urge to turn his head toward the huts and the cliff beyond, remembering the events of his last visit to Ahch-To. He had a sense that Rey was struggling with the same memory.

"Like drowning," Luke acknowledged. "It's easy to drown. Your limbs grow tired. Your lungs demand breath. If you give in, you fall. Some people are natural swimmers. For others, it takes the experience of almost drowning to make them learn.” He gestured, unnecessarily, at Ben. “The Jedi studied how to swim. The Sith practiced sacrifice, giving themselves to the sea."

"You said the Jedi didn't always use the Light Side," Rey argued.

Luke nodded. "I did. The Light Side is not control. It’s not swimming. Using the Light," he told them, "is like learning how to breathe water."

.

Luke's lecture was, in a way, prophetic. The sky grew heavy that evening, the air charged and blustery. A restless anticipation pervaded the island. Thunder snarled, low in warning, and then the water which the air had stolen from the sea was returned.

Rey reveled in it. Ben had never seen her in such a state of exaltation. It was quiet, private, and ecstatic. She was out in the narrow strip of field where the Falcon rested. Ben watched her from the shelter of the storage hut, making no pretense for his presence there. The guard Classen sat on a stack of crates, unbothered by his charge's whimsy, and Ben ignored him.

Rey was dancing.

He did not think it was her intention. She was working on combat forms, her double-bladed yellow saber slicing through dusk and rain like an unlikely sunbeam. She was smiling immensely, almost laughing, rejoicing at the sizzle of raindrops on her blade, at the torrent that plastered her hair to her skin. It didn't look comfortable to Ben, but he understood where her joy came from. He wondered if it had ever rained on Jakku.

"When are you gonna talk to her?"

Ben scowled at the interruption and didn't deign to look at Classen when he answered, "we do talk."

"You know what I mean."

He wasn't certain that he did, but he could make an educated guess. "It's not that simple."

"Sure it is."

It had been easy to keep his eyes on Rey. Now it was an effort not to turn and glare at the nosy guard. "I hurt her."

"So make it right."

"And how do I do that?"

"Talk to her." He could hear the smug smile on Classen's face. There was no need to look and see it. Perhaps if he refrained from answering, the guard would overcome his ridiculous notion that they were on speaking terms.

Rey, at least, was distant enough not to have overheard the exchange, and still she danced.


	4. One Candle

His dreams that night were vague and confusing, more feeling than solid impression. Fear and anger, bursting like the ill-restrained energy of a cracked kyber crystal. A desperate sense of time running out, of doing all he was able and not making a difference. As the nightmare was reaching its crescendo and surely would wake him up, that presence from the previous night returned, cool and blue and soothing like water, like a breath of rain-soaked air before a summer storm.

_“You really do like to torture yourself.”_

The voice was kind, and too light-hearted for Ben's taste. Perhaps it was Rey. He wanted to think so, but why would she keep herself anonymous? She had every right to be in his head.

_“You're as bad as I was. Maybe worse.”_

That didn't sound like something Rey would say. Could it have been Luke visiting his dreams? If so, he had seriously misjudged his uncle's attitude.

The figure crossed its arms.  _"I wish I could have got to you sooner. I tried, you know. We all did."_

Ben hung his head. "I don't know how... I don't know where to go from here. Everything's ruined."

It was hard to make out, but he thought the figure was rolling its eyes. _“Everything's not ruined. The people you care about are still alive—well, mostly. What did that guard say the other day? Ah. Make it right.”_

Ben watched as the dreamscape fell away beneath his feet. The figure, too, was fading. "I don't know how."

_“Yeah, that's the part you have to figure out.”_

.

On the third day of his exile, Luke took him after breakfast to the sparring ring and kept him there for long hours, reviewing his boyhood lessons on shielding. Ben constructed and took down and reconstructed his mental barriers until they had both lost count of the times he'd done it, and all with a minimal exchange of words. Either it worked, or Ben was simply too exhausted afterward to feel the dysphoria of Snoke's absence. Luke left him alone to recover and he sat a long while upon the rain-dampened sand.

His guard ran out of patience before he did. He heard the small beep of her communicator being activated before she spoke. "Classen. Hey. No, we're fine, except I'm gonna knock him over if he doesn't move in five minutes. Send the girl or something. This kid's hopeless."

Ben came inelegantly to his feet, ignoring the sand that clung to his clothing. "No. Tell him not to send Rey."

Brell looked at him, plainly trying to hide a smile. "Why not?"

He walked past her, an excuse not to meet her eyes. "There is no need to bother her. I'm fine."

The guard held her breath as if trying not to argue. Ben kept walking and was thankful when she fell into step without complaint, only muttering a low “never mind,” into her comm unit.

As if to spite his protests, it was Rey he ran into. If it had been anyone else, he would have thought it chance, but not her. His thoughts must have led his feet unbidden. He knew she was there before he turned the corner into the garden, but he could not have brought himself to stop.

Rey was crouched near an especially overgrown patch in the back, busily stripping out weeds. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of his footsteps, though she could surely recognize his presence in the Force as easily as he did hers. "How did it go with Luke?"

"Tiring."

"Did you make any progress?"

"We'll see."

Rey wrinkled her nose at him and went back to gardening. "Make yourself useful and help me with this, if you're not too tired."

He came to stand behind her and squinted at the tangle of foliage. "What do you want me to do?"

"Pull everything out except these ones." She slipped her palm under a thin, dark green vine and lifted it for him to see. It had only a few, scarce leaves, but it was strung heavily with white flowers, fragile-looking and smaller than the breadth of a fingernail.

Ben knelt down beside her and did as told.

It was not the largest plot in the garden, but the weeds had set in with a vengeance, taking advantage of Rey and Luke's absence. The job kept them busy until Ben's arms were sore and laced with cuts and scratches. He was content to ignore these minor complaints, but Rey snatched up his hand when she noticed and glared at it.

"Next time, wear gloves."

He flexed his hand between hers. The rough cloth of her gloves chafed at the scratches, coming away speckled with blood. Rey looked disgusted.

"Honestly, you wouldn't last a day on Jakku. You would have died from sunburn."

That seemed a bit harsh. Ben pulled his hand free and rubbed at it, centering himself on the ridged scabs. Such pain was no detriment. He somewhat enjoyed the way it magnified sensation as he curled and uncurled his fingers, stretching the damaged skin.

Rey was still frowning at him. "At least go wash it off."

When he didn't move fast enough, she caught him by the elbow and hauled him up. It was a ridiculous and ungainly move, given their contrast in heights. He couldn't gather his wits enough to protest before she was pulling him back towards the garden entrance. There was a well there, low to the ground and plain. Rey shoved the stone cover off and started reeling the bucket up—up and up all the long way from the underground lake he had come across during his meditation. It seemed a lot of work for a small bucket of water.

When the bucket was hefted up onto the stone rim, Rey tugged Ben ungently down and crammed his hands into the icy water.

"Some of those plants have oils that can irritate." She was rubbing vigorously as his hands while she spoke. "Sometimes they make scarring worse."

"A few more scars won't make a difference," he pointed out.

She smiled at that, though it was wry and fleeting. "Maybe not, but do you _want_ to tell people that you got your hands scarred up by a weed?"

Ben caught himself mirroring her tiny half-smile. "Perhaps I won't tell them anything at all."

"Oh, come on," she scoffed. "You love to hear yourself talk."

"Is that what you think?"

She looked up at him, apparently for lack of an answer. He caught her gaze and held it... Then grimaced and pulled his hands out of the bucket. They were going numb from the cold.

Rey dropped her gaze. "Ben, about... that time... what you said before we killed Snoke..." She stumbled through the sentence, barely making sense, but there was only one thing she could have been referring to. "Do you still...?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

He didn't know why she felt the need to ask. She had seen into his thoughts. She knew.

Rey got up and left him then. He didn't see her again until dinner, and she kept her silence.

.

Although his shielding had held throughout the day, his dreams came with a vengeance.

It started deceptively, calm and too quiet. He was on the island. Nothing had changed. He was watching birds in the sky from the sparring ring, or something that looked like birds. Several small shapes chased one great black one. Whether they were flocking with it or driving it away, he couldn’t be sure, but the wings of the black one were held at an odd, high angle, not conducive to gliding as birds of prey did.

He had rarely seen his own ship from the ground.

The Upsilon and its coterie of TIE fighters were wheeling to land on the ledge above. Ben stared, uncomprehending, until the larger ship fired a series of heavy cannon bursts and an explosion bloomed from the spot where the Falcon had rested.

Ben knew with a sudden, soul-crushing certainty who was on his ship.

He ran.

He should have been running away. It didn't occur to him until he was half way up to the field. Every speck of survival instinct told him to go, but survival instinct came second to protecting Rey.

The Upsilon landed like some great predator closing in on its wounded prey. Ben ran. He held his hand out to the side and his lightsaber was there as if he had carried it all along. It buzzed to life as he mounted the last of the steps and slowed, willing himself to keep going against the stiffness of his terror.

The ramp hissed and lowered, hydraulic steam billowing around it, an ephemeral veil.

The Supreme Leader descended alone.

Ben went to his knees.

His saber sizzled in the dying grass, ignored.

The cloaked figure came slowly, deceptively fragile, slender and wiry like a starving thing. He came to stand before his former disciple and freed one mutilated hand from his robes. Long fingers were tucked under Ben's chin, coaxing him, turning his face up to let his master look at him. The touch was so tender it stopped Ben's heart.

"Kylo Ren..." Snoke drew out the name, lingering over each syllable. "You have gone astray."

Ben quivered. His saber was throwing sparks, raining points of heat over his bare hand, but it was a distant sensation.

"You have taken up with thieves... terrorists... extremists... A family who betrayed you. You have forsaken what you are... and all for something as small and fleeting as love."

Ben wanted to pull away, wanted to strike out, but could not. He was sure that if he moved, Snoke would show no mercy.

"I forgive you."

The words shot through him like electricity. He swayed with the impact, but Snoke's free hand came to rest on his shoulder, steadying him. Ben almost leaned into the touch. It was a vile, desperate temptation. It would be so easy to mold himself back into that life he knew. Terrible, but easy. At least he would have purpose. At least he would have aim and freedom of a sort—the galaxy at his fingertips, if only he obeyed.

Forgiveness… but he already had that.

It would be, as it had been, a life built on a lie.

Snoke was wrong. It was not love that had changed him. Not for his mother or his father, and not for Rey. It was hatred. He had hated too much what he had become.

Snoke's fingers curled, a monster’s claws, and dug into his shoulder like knives.

Ben swung his saber between them and it flashed, blinding, red as sunlight on blood—

The crash of the little table hitting the far wall of his hut snapped him awake. He stared across at it, uncomprehending, until it occurred to him that he must have thrown it himself, with the aid of the Force and a dream-fueled fury.

Rey was in the doorway, glowing with the light from the lantern in her hand. Ben stared at her the same way he had stared at the ruin of the nightstand, then dropped his gaze in shame. "A nightmare," he mumbled. "Go back to bed."

She didn't. "I'll help you."

He wasn't sure of her intent until she went to the broken table and set her lantern down. He had well and truly smashed it, chunks and splinters strewn across the hut. Rey started gathering them up, piece by piece, and stacking them into a pile. Sluggishly, Ben moved to help her.

"How long did it take you to get to sleep? I heard you moving around earlier."

"I don't know."

"You didn't sleep much last night either."

"No."

His minimalistic answers gave her pause, but not for long. "What were you dreaming about?"

He considered the merits of lying to her, telling her he didn't remember, but there was little point. She had seen the darkest parts of him already. "Snoke," he said. "He came back."

"What happened?"

Ben closed his fist around a jagged shard of driftwood, distracting himself with the real, physical pain. Eventually, the dream became distant enough that he could speak of it. "I wanted to go back to him."

"Why?"

"It would be easier... to let someone else decide my fate."

She picked up a few more splinters, leaving him to wonder if he had said too much. Finally, she asked, "did you?"

"Almost."

"That's not a 'yes'."

"I bowed to him." Ben pressed the spike deeper into his palm.

"It was just a dream."

It was an ineffective balm, but he didn't know how to argue. Something else was nagging at him. He gave up searching for answers and let his mind wander until it came to him. "You were here when I woke up. Why?"

"You were... I could feel you. What's the word Luke uses?"

A knot of dread tied itself around his gut. To think of what she might have seen... "I was projecting?"

"Yeah." She looked down at her work. "You were afraid."

"I'm sorry."

"It wasn't your fault."

Another brick came loose from the foundation of his long-ingrained beliefs.

His hand was bleeding. He dropped the sliver of wood and curled his fingers, hiding it from Rey, hoping she wouldn’t sense it regardless. There was no need to make her worry again. The dim light of the lantern seemed to aid him, as did her focus on the task at hand.

When the shattered ruin of the table had been piled into one spot, Rey used a piece of cloth from the storage crate to bundle it up and carry it outside. What she did with it then, Ben did not know. She came back shortly, still picking small splinters out of the fabric, and regarded him where he sat in the halo of her lantern. "There's still some time left before dawn. You should try to get more sleep."

"I won't be able to." He had passed enough nights like this one to be sure of that.

Rey sighed. Then, curiously, she stepped past him and sat down next to his pallet, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Lie down. I'll tell you a story."

Ben was skeptical of the notion, hardly a child anymore, but he had no energy to argue, and so no worth in it. It was a gift that she wanted to stay near him at all.

When he had made himself as comfortable as he could, Rey started talking. She talked about Jakku, about a day in the life of a scavenger, and the way the desert looked at night. Her voice was pleasant, but it was the echoes of the Force that lulled him. It pulsed with the beat of her heart, as it had before, flashing in greens and yellows when he closed his eyes, and colors that had no name. He could not have said when he stopped hearing her words and started dreaming them. When he woke again, there was sunlight streaming in through the door and Rey was gone.

.

He came to breakfast, but found no interest in the casual conversation. Not even Rey's renewed chattiness could hold his attention. He ate sparingly, his mind elsewhere, and then left the table with a mumbled excuse about going for a walk. Rey tensed and looked like she might rise too, but a small gesture from Luke kept her. Ben was glad of it.

He wandered the stone paths, past his hut, past the fork that would have taken him to the sparring ring. He followed a course he had not taken before, and eventually, when the path turned towards the sea, he left it entirely, cutting down into the ravine between the island's peaks. There were more trees here where the rainwater gathered, though they tended towards a stubby, twisted variety. Ben walked in their dappled shade, winding his way around boulders and eroded drop-offs. The guard Classen followed at a distance, murmuring into his communicator every now and then.

He had been out for some time, long enough to forget the chill of the morning, when Ben started catching movement from the corner of his eye. The first time, he blamed his imagination. The second and third, he took it for an animal or a falling leaf. The glimpses came sporadic and far between. It was not until the fourth time that he recognized the silhouette of a human figure, limned in blue light. Ben stopped and stared, but the figure passed behind a tree and was gone. Curious in spite of himself, he picked his way in that direction, splashing through a tiny brook and scratching his arm on a thorn bush that he had no patience to avoid. When he reached the tree, there was nothing behind it save for a little pile of rocks grown over in vines and ferns—a pile of rocks, and a pressure in the Force that grew heavier the longer he lingered. It was strong, but not ungentle, more defined than the universal flow of life energy. It felt like the signature of a Jedi, and it felt intimately familiar.

Ben contemplated the option of sitting down to meditate, but there was something in the pull of the wind and the earth that warned him against it. The energies of the island were too active, wilder than they were in the garden. Reaching too deeply would be like trying to swim through river rapids. He would almost surely lose himself in the chase. He scanned his surroundings instead, turning a full circle and seeing no one but his patient warden. Slower this time, he resumed the course through the woods he had followed before being led astray by ghosts.

By the time he made it back to the village, his thoughts were dull and his limbs aching. There was a heaviness behind his eyes that made him want to lie down in spite of the midday sun and sleep. He thought it might come easily for a change, and had every intention of testing the theory, but Rey caught him on the path, all high energy and sparkling eyes.

"There you are! There was call. Finn and Poe and Rose—you remember them—they've invited me to their wedding! Chewie and I will be leaving in three days."

Ben stared at her, his mind gone slow. She was leaving? "You'll..." He cleared his throat. "Will you come back?"

Rey blinked. "Of course. I… I want to take a few days, but I'll be back." Her voice had gone subdued. She must have realized how the news was effecting him. "I'd take you with me if I could."

"Would you really?" He doubted that, but he forced a wry smile, turning the question into a self-depreciating jab.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Apparently, she didn’t find it funny. "Yes, I would." He saw her hands move. It was an aborted gesture. They lifted, then stopped, and then fell. It looked as if she had meant to touch him, but had thought better of it. "You'll have to take care of yourself," she said instead. "Maybe Luke can help you with your nightmares."

.

Being given a deadline on the time he had with Rey was more hindrance than help. The days went too fast, meals and meditation and vain attempts at sleep. Even the practice with Rey's Light trick, which should have been worth all of it, seemed over too quickly and impossible to relive afterwards.

When Ben had been on the island for six days, Luke found him contemplating the sky outside his hut. By way of greeting, his uncle handed him one of the wooden practice blades. "You're getting stronger. I think you should work on your combat forms."

Ben almost made a snide remark about being trusted, or about making himself a useful tool for the Republic, but it didn't seem to matter enough. Luke started off on the road to the sparring ring without another word, and Ben followed. He wondered at first why Rey wasn't joining them, and then felt relieved by the fact. The image of him with a blade, even a wooden one, was probably not a sight she was eager to see. For both their sakes, Ben was content to delay that experience a little while longer.

It had been perhaps two or three weeks since he last held a weapon in his hands, but days of rapid change and days of endless, aimless drifting made it feel like a decade. The downfall of Snoke might as well have been a lifetime ago.

He took up a stance in the center of the ring, raising his blade in the first position of the forms he had practiced with the Knights of Ren.

He held it longer than he should have.

It felt wrong. It felt out of place in the sunlit, sea-scented arena. It was too great a disconnect from the coldly lit dueling chambers and the First Order ships that had borne witness to so much of his training. Reminding himself to breathe, he moved into the second position, but his stance and grip were weak. He tried the next with the same result, and then dropped it impatiently and started over.

Luke watched this process without critique. Ben made it through the whole set on the second try, but it was rushed and ungraceful. He huffed out a breath and gave his arms a shake, as if all he needed to do was loosen up. It was his mind, however, and not his body that threw him off. He could not stop visualizing himself aboard the Finalizer, on the deck where he had gone through these exercises every morning.

"Try the forms I taught you."

Ben hesitated, dragging himself back to the present. It shamed him to think on his early training, though when he questioned himself, he could not explain why. He had a vague memory of feeling weak and out of place, but that might have been Snoke's influence. So many things were.

Steeling himself, he took up a new defensive stance, testing his balance until it felt even. He drew on images from his adolescence, his childhood. Luke had taught him the basics of swordsmanship during family visits, years before his official training began. It was a strange, bright moment amidst the brooding darkness that permeated his memories. The later strife with his uncle tainted it and made it tragic, but he could still recall the excitement of that first day, the dreams and inklings of a heroic future as he stood in the light, holding a toy sword not too unlike the one he held now.

He stepped through the first set of forms. They were simple, beginner’s moves, but the fluid motion eased some of the tension from his shoulders.

"Again."

He wheeled through the set a second time, faster, and then Luke prompted him into another cycle they had practiced often, and another. Some of the stances had gone unused since his defection, but they were not forgotten. Ben's mind had never been dull or clumsy—not of its own account. There was simply a lot of clutter in the way.

Looking at it in that light, perhaps he was not entirely hopeless.

.

Rey found him that night out on the narrow field, counting the stars above the silhouette of his father's ship. He expected her to badger him into going to bed. Instead, she sat down beside him and followed his gaze.

"They were brighter on Jakku," she said after a spell. "The air is too damp here."

"We _are_ on an island."

"I know."

"Do you miss it?"

"What?"

"Jakku."

 _"No."_ There was too much force in her voice. She took a breath and tried again, more gently. "No. I hated it there. Do you miss the First Order?"

"No." He glanced at her sidelong. "I hated it there."

"Then let's not talk about it."

Ben let the silence return. He didn't know what else to talk about, and Rey didn't offer anything. Eventually he laid back on the grass and pillowed his head on his arms.

"... What was it like training with Luke before?" Rey asked.

"Not like this," he told her. "We traveled. He was always searching for old Jedi relics... Temples. Libraries."

"So you were scavengers."

Ben didn't need to look to know that she was smiling. "You could say that."

"Well, do you miss that?"

"I... don't know." He frowned at the hazy night sky. "In a way, I do, but I was... I would not have said so at the time."

"Because of Snoke?"

"Because of Snoke. Because of my mother and father..."

"Leia told me..." She hesitated. A glance in her direction caught her chewing at her bottom lip. "She said that she was too busy, and that she and Han were always fighting, and then he would leave."

"Yes."

"She said that when your Force abilities started showing, they didn't know how to help you. She said you couldn't control yourself."

"Control has never been one of my strong points," he agreed, lilting the words with wry false humor.

"Was that Snoke too?"

"I don't think so."

She was silent, but there was a tension coming off her as if she held something back. He wondered if he should ask, or how, but she spared him the ordeal of trying. "I miss Han."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

He wanted to say that he missed his father too. He wanted to say that he wished Han was there, that he could talk to him, forgive him and be forgiven. Some idealistic, boyish part of him wanted to say that he would do it all over again, make it right this time, but he remembered too many days lost to disappointment, and too many nights awake in his bed, unsure if he had been forgotten or simply ignored. Not all of it had been his fault or Snoke's. It would be easier to lay the blame there, but it would be untrue. He would have taken back that moment on Starkiller Base if he could, but he could not forgive his father for everything. He would be lying if he told her otherwise.

"Why did you... Why did you kill him?"

It should have been hard to answer, but it wasn’t. "I thought it would make me stronger."

"Did it?"

"No." The only thing it had strengthened was his doubts. He told her so.

"So he saved you." She was reaching, he thought, for some way to make it better.

"I haven't been saved. It was too late for that."

Rey looked down at him. He could make out her frown in the starlight. "Yes you have. You're still healing, that's all."

He was impressed by the depths of her optimism. "Do you think I can?"

She nodded once. "Yes."

"Hm. Well.” He attempted a wry smile. It came out dour. “That makes one of us."

She was still wearing her own frown, and looked as if she meant to make it permanent. "Why else would you be here?"

"To keep me out of the way," he said easily. "To put me where the Resistance won't have to think about me anymore—at least until I've been properly tamed and collared." He didn't bother inflecting his words with the bitterness that festered in him. It was a matter of fact.

"It isn't about being tamed and collared." She gave those words the disgust they were due, making up for his nonchalance. "Well... maybe it is for the people who don't know you, but they don't matter. What about your mother?"

"My mother deserves better."

If anything, that made her angrier. "Your mother doesn't _want_ better. She wants _you_."

He swallowed his initial answer to that. Eventually, he said, "you should have been her daughter."

"What?"

"And I should have been the one left on Jakku, where I couldn't hurt anyone."

Rey had that little furrow in the skin above her nose. "Then Snoke would have gotten to me instead of you and it would all be the same anyway."

That was a terrifying thought. Snoke would have delighted in corrupting Rey's Light. She might have resisted longer than Ben had, but even Rey could not have stood up to it in the end. The Supreme Leader had been as patient as he was powerful. To think of Rey at his mercy...

Ben drew a shuddering breath, feeling his insides go to ice.

"I'm sorry." Her frown had changed to one of concern. "I shouldn't have. We shouldn't be talking about this."

He sat up, draping his arms over his knees. "I'm not going to lose control, if that's what you're worried about."

She looked at him as if trying to read his mind, but she didn't. She was keeping her thoughts carefully walled off. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"There, you see?" Out of the darkness, she had the nerve to grin. "You're already getting better."

Confounding girl. Ben wanted to scowl at her. He didn't know how to counter the point, though. She was wrong. At least, he thought so. It was not the same thing. Learning to keep his madness contained was not the same as curing it. Even if he had more control now, there was every chance that he would lose it again in the future—that the storm would still be there.

Rey did not give him long to stew over it. She rolled to her feet and held out a hand. "We should try to get some sleep. It's cold out here."

He hesitated, trapped for a moment in the planes of starlight and shadow across her hand. When he reached for it, she hauled him up, and when he kept his fingers curled around hers, she did not pull away. They stayed like that until they reached the place between their two huts. There, Rey paused and looked at him askance, then pulled her hand free. The night felt colder without her touch.

"Good night, Ben. Try not to throw anymore furniture in your sleep."

He thought he might be blushing. "Good night, Rey."

He lingered until she was out of sight, ignored the guard Brell who had dutifully shadowed him, and went inside to take Rey's advice.

.

He was on Starkiller Base, in Snoke's chamber. The oversized holo was deactivated and the Supreme Leader stood there in person, his back to Ben, facing the familiar outline of an interrogation chair. Ben approached slowly, trying not to be noticed, but needing to see who his master held prisoner.

Then Snoke flicked his hand, a casual gesture, and Rey's cry shook the room.

Ben's lightsaber was in his hand, crackling. He ran in great strides, cut Snoke to nothing with a single strike, and then dropped his saber and disengaged the restraints. Rey fell into his arms, clinging hard enough to hurt, and he went to the floor with her, stroking her back, her hair, murmuring her name like a prayer, anything to smooth the lines of pain etching her face.

Rey let him, breathing in slow, audible gasps as she tried to gather herself. It took her less time than Ben would have expected, knowing what Snoke was capable of. Her jaw was still clenched in discomfort when she raised her head, but she shrugged off his hands and grabbed his shoulders instead, urging him to his feet. "Let's get out of here."

They ran together for the exit, and Ben found himself warring between horror and confused exhilaration. Rey was close. She held his hand and she held her mind open to him, full of life and strength in spite of her ordeal. From the corner of his eye, she gleamed like a star.

When they reached the open doorway, it did not feel as if the rest of the base was waiting ahead, still to be traversed. It felt like once they passed the threshold, they would be safe. With hardly a breath to prepare, they stepped across in unison...

And then Ben was facing the chamber again, alone, while Rey screamed in the restraints.

He stood too long uncomprehending. It didn't make sense. It wasn't fair. He had rescued her. He had killed Snoke. Why couldn’t they escape?

Rey gasped—a hollow, choking sound—and Ben was jolted into action. He didn't bother with the saber this time. He ripped Snoke away with his bare hands. His former master staggered sideways and dropped away. There was no floor beyond the dais. The path to the exit had become the same bridge on which Kylo Ren had slain his father.

He freed Rey again and pulled her to him, thinking that if he held her tightly enough, he could keep her from going back. She was conscious, but limp, still caught in the aftershocks of torture. He cradled her. He pressed his face to her hair, willing her to be safe. It worked until she recovered enough to insist they try again, and again it was the threshold that sent her back.

Ben was ready this time. The instant she left his side, he was sprinting back across the walk. This time, he did not slay the Supreme Leader, but pushed past him to stand in front of Rey, holding the tip of his saber to Snoke's neck. If he kept him at bay long enough, maybe they could find a different way out.

Rey was already working on her restraints. After a spurt of fruitless struggle, he heard her grow still. A few frightful heartbeats passed, and then the manacles clicked open. She used her hands to free her legs, then scrambled up and took a fighting stance behind Ben. "Let's make him leave with us."

It was a good idea. Ben flicked his lightsaber, meaning to signal Snoke to turn around, but the weapon was gone. The walls were tilted at an odd angle, or he was, and Rey was no longer at his back. There was something cold there instead, propping him up, but when he tried to turn and look, he met resistance. He opened his mouth to say something—to question—to protest—

—and then Snoke hit him with a torrent of pain and he knew where he was.

The Supreme Leader raised one hand and twisted it in the air, a delicate gesture, and Ben's eyes widened until he thought they would burst. He did not scream. He couldn’t squeeze the air past his throat. He felt his teeth grind and his lips pull back instead, out of his control. Then Snoke snapped his fingers open and Ben's head slammed into the back of the chair.

Where was _Rey?_

He fought to see past the throbbing pressure in his skull. When he spotted her, she was midway down the catwalk, hanging from the edge as if Snoke had tried to throw her off.

Another lance of pain shot through him, rending his breath away. His muscles strung themselves tight enough to break. He would have doubled over, but the restraints forbade it. Snoke was hitting him again and again, leaving only enough time between blows to give each new strike emphasis. Ben couldn't think about escape. He couldn't think about Rey. He could only try to keep breathing, try to stay conscious until the end.

The end came when something swiped Snoke's legs out from under him and he collapsed in a heap. Rey was there, standing over him with a snarl on her face. She held not a saber, but a knobby metal pole, the end of which she pressed into Snoke's throat until he gagged. "Any ideas, Ben?"

He didn't know why she was asking him. He was far from being able to think straight.

Thankfully, she didn't wait too long for a response. "Maybe we should put _him_ in the chair."

Ben tried to center himself and Force the shackles open, but his head was still reeling. Rey let go of her staff with one hand and flicked her wrist, freeing him with an easy thought. He lurched out of the chair and succeeded in falling on his face. When he was able to raise his head, Snoke was gone, and Rey was still brandishing her staff at the empty spot on the floor. Both of them froze where they were, but when the scene did not reset itself, Rey put her weapon down and came to his side. He breathed easier at the feel of her hand on his back and, bit by bit, he was able to pull his limbs under himself and sit up.

"That thing Snoke does..." Her voice was low and weary. "Did he do that to you before?"

"Yes."

"I'm so sorry." Her hand was still on his back, stroking with short, slow sweeps. He melted into her touch, training all of his focus on it until the torture receded to memory.

"How do we get out of here?"

"I wish I knew." Reluctantly, Ben climbed to his feet, mourning the loss when her hand fell away. "We might—"

"It's a dream," she interrupted. Then, as suddenly as Snoke had vanished, so did she.

"Rey!" He knew the futility of it even as he shouted her name. She was no where on the base. He took a step towards the exit and then realized it too was gone, replaced by endless, featureless wall. There was only the walkway, the dais, the chair, and himself.

"Kylo Ren..."

The voice came from all around. Snoke had neither reappeared on the catwalk nor projected himself in giant form, but he was there. He would always be there. Ben would never be free of him—not completely.

He summoned his lightsaber and stepped out onto the bridge, paying no mind to the deadly abyss on either side. There were worse ways to fall. His skin tingled, hairs standing up all over in anticipation. His former master could attack him in a hundred different ways, a thousand, but he made Ben wait, utilizing suspense and fear as weapons in their own right.

When he did come, it was all at once, suddenly right in front of Ben, and Ben reacted without a thought. His blade took Snoke through the chest, humming and smoking with the smell of burnt meat.

And then it wasn't Snoke.

He had been looking at that hated face when he struck the blow, but now Rey looked back at him, lit crimson by the blade through her heart. It was Rey, mouth open, eyes full of betrayal, who lifted a trembling hand to his face. It was Rey who fell, slumping over the edge and plummeting into the darkness below, while Ben shook with the feeling of her life leaving her.

He sat up at the _fwap_ of her blankets hitting the ground. She was hastily arranging her bedding alongside his, lit by the lantern she had left in the doorway. An aura of exhaustion hung around her of the sort that inspires madness in the quest for a solution, and often results in regret.

"Your dreams," she grumbled, not looking at him, "are worse than mine."

Ben stared, dreading her implication. "What do you... That wasn't..." It was difficult to speak around the cold, liquid horror in his chest. "Did you _see?_ "

"Snoke? That kriffing chair?" She jerked her pallet straight with more force than was necessary. "I was there. I didn't just... We were having the same dream."

Ben put his head in his hands. "… I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Just lie down. I have to fly the Falcon tomorrow and I am _going_ to get a good night's sleep." She crawled into bed and tucked herself in.

Ben watched her from between his fingers. "How are you...?"

"Just lie down. Let me try this." When he obeyed, too mystified to argue, she instructed him to give her his hand.

Ben turned on his side to face her and did as told. She cupped her calloused fingers over his, loosely, and closed her eyes. Her innate brightness outshone the lantern at the door and Ben couldn’t help but soak it in, floating in it as one floats on a calm sea, until the rest of the world faded away and he was aware only of her Light.


	5. To Light Our Way

Rey was still there when he woke, curled up and tangled in her blanket. Their tentative handhold had not remained such during the night. At some point, without waking him, Rey had claimed half his arm. She was hugging it to her chest as a child would cuddle a toy, her face pressed into the back of his hand. She had drooled on it a little.

Ben held very still.

Perhaps it was his too-fast heartbeat that disturbed her slumber, or the change in his breathing. Perhaps it was something less solid, an awareness of his waking through the Force. Perhaps she had just had enough sleep. Ben expected to feel a sense of loss when her eyes opened, dreading the withdrawal of her unguarded trust, but waking brought a drowsy smile and the unabashed acknowledgment of what had passed between them. It was worth the price of her pulling away, and the look on her face when she noticed the drool on his hand and tried to wipe it off. It was worth it for the easy way she sat up and took stock of his sleep-mussed appearance.

It was worth it for the honest, casual concern in her voice when she asked him, "anymore nightmares?"

"No."

"Good."

Belatedly, it occurred to him that he should return the question. "Did you dream?"

"No... I don't think so. I slept well." She was looking a little pink under the abundance of freckles. "Ahch-To's too cold most nights."

Ben bit his tongue on the impulse to invite her to stay again. It would sound wrong, and even if she did understand, he didn't have the right to ask. Rey was standing and straightening her clothes. The soft, loose-fitting tunics and trousers that dominated both of their wardrobes now were easily wrinkled, but comfortable to sleep in—not a great combination, unless one lived in an abandoned island village with no real standard of fashion.

He had not yet gotten around to asking who had supplied their clothing, or how they had been able to estimate his size. He entertained the ridiculous image of his mother folding and sorting the items herself. Ridiculous, because surely if she’d had anything to do with it, it would have been merely to delegate the task to an assistant, and it seemed more likely she hadn’t involved herself at all. His measurements could have been taken while he was unconscious and unclothed in a bacta tank. That would probably have been less awkward for whoever had to do it that asking the General about her traitorous son.

Rey stood and started rolling up her pallet, tugging Ben's mind back to the present. "Your friend, the former First Order soldier..." He knew better than to use the trooper's old identification number, but he had been too preoccupied to memorize the man's chosen name.

"Finn," she supplied.

"Finn." He made a mental note of it. "He's marrying Poe Dameron?"

"And Rose Tico."

“And…. who?”

“She’s a mechanic.”

He couldn’t for the life of him remember if they’d met. "I would ask you to give them my regards, but I don't think they'd take it the right way." He attempted something resembling a smile, meaning to convey humor. He wasn’t sure it came out the right way, but Rey paid it back with a grin to rival the sun.

"I'll tell them."

Another thought came to him, cycling back from his musings of a moment ago. "Will my mother be attending?"

"I'll be surprised if she doesn't." Rey was fidgeting with her rolled up blankets, accomplishing nothing except to keep her hands busy.

"What will you tell her about me?"

Her hands stilled and she squinted at him. "What do you want me to tell her?"  
  
Ben had failed to think that far. "That I..." He looked aside, studying the weave of his blankets as if the answer lay somewhere between the threads. He considered asking her to say that he was doing better, but he wasn't sure that was true. He almost asked her to tell his mother that he loved her, and that he was sorry, but he wasn't sure it was the right time. He wasn't sure if it would ever be the right time. "Tell her that I miss her," he settled on, and then had to stop himself from taking it back, not wholly certain if he should say as much as that.

But Rey was smiling again, and there was a depth to it that she rarely let him see. "I'll tell her. Come on." She left her sleeping roll on the floor and held out a hand. "Let's go see if Luke's awake yet."

.

Rey left after breakfast. She had told him goodbye, but he had been unable to respond. The best he could do was to keep a straight face while his despair knotted itself into a Mobius strip.

"I suppose I'll have to keep you busy while she's gone," Luke muttered, sounding put off by the notion. "Can't have her coming back to a sad puddle on the floor in the shape of my nephew."

"A puddle," Ben echoed in a disbelieving monotone.

"You look like one sometimes."

"I should be offended."

"If you like," Luke agreed. "Let's go work on your lightsaber forms."

It was another drawn-out session in the sparring ring, first in combat maneuvers and then in meditation. After a long struggle to rein in his restless mind, Luke guided him through an out-of-body exploration like those he had embarked on alone. Following Luke's direction, he rode a high arc of energy that bridged their island and the nearest one over.

"There is a crystal vein here. Pontite crystals,” Luke explained.

Ben could feel it—a dusky sort of glow below the surface of the island. It reminded him of water droplets, or of cold air on skin. It reminded him of the entity who had guarded his dreams. It let him breathe a little deeper. If he was ever required to build a new lightsaber, it was good to know there was a crystal source nearby.

They explored the rest of the archipelago this way, Luke acting as a tether to keep Ben from drifting off as he was prone. There were ruins on two other islands, along with less physical traces of Jedi activity, but none as powerful or as clearly defined as the ones on the island Luke had chosen.

When they came back to themselves, Luke gave Ben no time to rest or to brood, but sent him with Classen to collect firewood from the ravine. The wind was picking up, cutting swift between the peaks with a wintery bite. Ben hunched his shoulders against it, but made no complaint. The physical annoyance served to keep his thoughts from lingering too long on the absence of Rey.

He was shivering by the time he and Classen delivered their armloads of deadfall to the cooking hut. Luke looked him over critically and told him to go sit by the oven, then exited and returned minutes later with a ratty beige garment which he dumped in Ben's lap. "Freezing to death is one of those things that would make Rey unhappy."

Unfolding the item, Ben discovered an ugly and familiar poncho. He was tempted to dump it on the floor, but it wasn’t worth the weight of Luke’s disappointment. He pulled it on roughly over his gray tunic and pretended not to care how it clashed.

His uncle was stifling a smile. "Stay and help me cook."

.

Luke was reasonably successful in keeping Ben's mind occupied through the course of that first day. His sleep came restless, but not tumultuous, and he woke in the early hours of dawn with a vague memory of that same blue-lit presence, and of words spoken in his own voice but not by him. Lying awake on his pallet, he could hear Luke on the path outside his hut, talking with someone. He assumed it was one of the guards, but only Luke's half of the conversation was audible.

"... think he will.... Huh. That's up to them." A chuckle. "Did he? .... No, thank you for helping. He needs all the help he can get.... I'll tell her, but you know how stubborn she is.... As you keep saying… Thank you, Father."

Ben went stiff all over, desperate for another word, but all that came was the sound of Luke's retreating footsteps.

It couldn't be.

The presence in his dreams, the ghost in the woods... The thought had crossed his mind before, but he had refused to consider it seriously. It was too much.

He stared at the stone ceiling and tried to breathe, wondering how he could confront his uncle about this, or if he should.

.

Luke tried again to keep hum busy as he had the day before, but the tasks ran menial and failed to keep his mind from wandering. It was Ben's idea to work in the garden, plying Luke for instructions on what to weed, what to trim, and what was ready for harvesting. He visualized Rey working with him, and then felt guilty of it. It was a sad and flimsy fantasy, but he lacked the self-control to stop. He could see her hands beside his, efficient and strong, tugging the weeds up with deft twists. He could recall every detail of her smile, and the charming way she wrinkled her nose when she was amused. He could almost convince his own senses that she was there with him, but he could not recreate her Light.

He tried instead to imagine where she was at that moment and what she might be doing, surrounded by friends at a joyous occasion. That vision made him ache in other ways, jealousy only the least of them. She was more suited for the company of those who shone as brightly as she did. What did Ben have to offer but his gloomy shadow? If he cared so much for her, he should have been happy, he told himself. He shouldn't be wishing to condemn her to his lonely island. The trouble was, he didn't know what else he had to live for.

Why could her friends not have married before the trial, while Ben was still in his cell? Then, at least, she would not have had to go so far.

It was an unfair thought and he tried to dismiss it. The Resistance had been in shambles after taking on the First Order. It was a wonder they had found time and hands to spare at all. Ben knew this. He knew he should be understanding, be generous, but his emotions and his sense of logic seldom aligned...

Reasonable explanations and generosity be damned.

He wanted her back. It was insensitive of them, it was _selfish_ to take her away when he needed her most...

He nearly took off a finger with the trimmers before he realized how much his mental ranting was effecting his work.

Brell watched him intensely, perhaps expecting him to turn on her with the bladed tool, or on himself. Her voice, in contrast, was mild and half-joking when she asked, "do you need me to take those away from you?"

He held out the clippers wordlessly, entertaining himself by imagining her surprise at his cooperation. If there was any truth to the fantasy, it didn't show. She took the tool without comment while Ben watched blood pool in the lines of his palm. His finger throbbed. He remembered Rey's hands on his and the shock of icy water, and wondered if she would scold him for venting his frustration on her trees. He went to the well to wash the blood away, levitating the bucket up rather than wasting time on another menial, repetitive task.

The cut hadn't reached bone, but it was bleeding profusely and stinging more than he cared to put up with. The cold of the water helped, but only a little. A muffled click pulled his attention to Brell and he watched her suspiciously as she undid the clasps on a rectangular pouch attached to her belt. He had noticed its twin in Classen's equipment, but hadn't bothered to wonder what it was for. From hers, Brell pulled out a square of adhesive padding and a tiny pair of scissors which she used to cut the pad in half. "Bacta patch," she informed him bluntly. "Dry your hand."

He pressed his hand into his shirt, careless of bloodstains, keeping a blank face at the renewed sting in his finger. Brell handed him the patch when he reached for it.

"Looking at you, it's like you didn't know that stuff was available," she said, and the useless commentary annoyed him. Ben emptied the bucket over a patch of vegetables and lowered it back into the well. Brell was still talking. "I hear Rey gave you that big one. Looks like it hurt. Why didn't you get it fixed?"

"It was a reminder."

"I knew a guy who liked to keep his scars." She was checking and reordering the contents of her medical pouch. Ben retrieved the trimmers and resumed his task stiffly, trying and failing to tune her out. "My old drill sergeant," she elaborated. "Never saw the appeal of it, myself. Scars mean you lost."

"Scars are lessons to be learned from," he bit out, keeping a careful eye on his work.

"Huh. Fair point." A pause, too short to be a relief. "Rey seems to like it, anyway."

Ben felt his ears go hot. He wanted to think it was from outrage rather than embarrassment. "I don't know what you mean."

"You got another reason why she can't keep her eyes off your face?"

Ben stilled the trimmers, squeezing the handle until his knuckles turned white. It was one thing to be kept under supervision like a reckless child. It was a measure he could almost agree with, if he allowed himself to critique his own behavior, but this was out of line. "I thought you were my warden, not my interrogator." The Force was growing oppressive around him, feeding off his poorly restrained energy. He pressed it around her like a stifling weight—not to hurt. Just to warn.

He saw her weight shift from the corner of his eye, but that was her only visible reaction. "I'm trying to be your friend." Infuriatingly, she smiled. "Bad idea on my part."

Ben denied that statement a response. He trimmed the garden trees and resolved to pretend she wasn't there. It was a relief, finally, when Classen came to take his shift.

.

Luke asked for his help with dinner again, making a stew of rehydrated broth from their supplies and of what Ben had brought back from the garden. It was a challenge to follow his simple instructions while Ben's head was buzzing with static. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want any of this. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted the galaxy to forget him. He wanted someone else's life. He didn't want to be lonely anymore. He wanted Rey.

He could see her here in place of him here, could imagine the pleasure she would find in such simple work. He could see the way the skin around her eyes would soften and how her hands would flow with the task, turning something as tedious as cutting vegetables into a dance. Ben yanked his mind away, an ill-behaved dog on a leash, and it fell inevitably on darker places—on the things he had taken from her. On the chances he had destroyed.

He was beginning to feel like the simmering stew pot, at risk of boiling over if left untended. He looked instead for release in words, blurting the first thing that came to mind. "Is my grandfather here?"

Luke looked at Ben, then cast his rheumy gaze around the hut, slowly, doubling back on dark corners. Searching. "Not right now. He might come if you call."

Ben hadn't meant it like that. "He _is_ on the island, then."

Luke’s gaze came back to his. "You talked to him."

Ben looked down, not quite certain how to process that. He had known since that morning, but to have it confirmed... "He did not make his identity known to me."

"Ah," said Luke. "Maybe he thought you wouldn't listen."

"I would have." Of course he would have. He had worshiped his grandfather in the days when he went by the name of Kylo Ren. Afterwards... well, the Sith Lord Vader had surrendered to the lure of the Light. Under Snoke’s teachings, Ben had thought it was a mistake. Afterwards, it became his grandfather's saving grace. Anakin Skywalker had been on the same journey Ben himself was enduring. Of course he would have listened.

"If I see him, I will tell him you said so," Luke offered, and turned his attention back to the stew.

.

Sleep came not at all that night. His mind was too busy, desperate to recall every word the ghost had spoken to him, and all the things that Kylo Ren had said in the hope of reaching him, praying to him for guidance along a path he no longer followed.

He sat crosslegged on his pallet, but the stillness soon became too much. Pulling a blanket around his shoulders, he stalked out into the night, feeling a petty spark of satisfaction at the muffled curse of the guard who scrambled to follow. He walked out onto the wide ledge where the Falcon had been. The place was dismal without its hulking resident, even in the dark. The stars were cloaked, and the clouds dimly lit from beneath. The sleeping sun’s light reached for them with ghostly fingers, carried by a trick of the atmosphere from beyond the planet’s horizon.

Ben picked a spot in the brooding clouds to stare at. If he imagined it hard enough, perhaps the Falcon would appear. He suffered a rare and demanding urge to talk, but not to his uncle, and certainly not to Brell. Rey would have listened. She would have looked at him with sympathy and found kind words to say. Back in his cell, her pity had disgusted him. Now he would have taken it gladly. He would have taken anything from her, even hatred, just as long as she was with him. If he were very, undeservedly lucky enough to have his preference, he would have taken her smile. He would have taken her small and wire-strong hand in his.

He curled his fingers at the thought, nails pressing into his palm, into the fresh scar from the night he had broken the table. The desperation with which he craved her touch was frightening.

There had been a moment, at Snoke's fall. A moment of impulsiveness. A moment of weakness. He had saved the memory, hoarding it for those times when nothing else would serve. Staring into the sky unseeing, he relived it now.  
He had been on the ground, bleeding, collapsed after the death of his master. She had knelt beside him, desperate, frightened. She had touched him. She had said his name, she had pleaded and commanded. Then, in some form of temporary madness, she had done something else.

Her lips on his had been a touch of life, divinely warm when all of him was cold from pain and loss.

It had not been desire. It could not have been. They both knew that. It had been the heat of victory, and the fear of losing an ally—even one she ought to hate. She knew how he felt—had known even then—and he knew that it was not reciprocated. There were things she kept from him, walls he could not cross, but it was too much to hope that she was hiding any fondness for him on a level to match his pathetic obsession. It would have been presumptuous to expect it of her, and ungenerous to ask her to try.

Shaking the image from his head, he moved on. He walked barefoot over the dew-laden grass. He walked for the sake of walking. The wind blew hard from behind him, throwing his hair into his face and making the blanket cling tight around his shoulders. His ears were aching and he feared his nose would start to run. The dark, at least, would spare him the humiliation of it, provided he stayed out of Brell's lantern light.

Brell was keeping her distance, though if she caught him sniffling, she might come after him with more blankets and soup. It cost him a flash of hot shame to think that he was pitiful enough to inspire his prison guard to baby him. He had been a scourge of the galaxy once, not long ago.

Hadn't he?

Thinking back, he questioned that too, and grimaced at the doubt. Had Kylo Ren been a terror to rival Lord Vader, or just a pretender, dangerous in the way a school bully was dangerous, looked down on by those with wisdom enough to see the trap he was in? Had he been merely someone to pity and to avoid, but not to respect?

Was he the last one to understand this of himself?

He sat down in the wet grass and sighed, lost in composing the words to define how distasteful a creature he was.

A streak of lightning lit the clouds over the sea, chased by grudging thunder. Ben lifted his head and waited for the next flash, needing something to train his senses on other than his own self-loathing.

The lightning came again, illuminating the stormfront in a sulky purple glow. He could feel the vibration of the thunder in his bones. He reached for it, wanting to fly with the storm and take out his frustrations on the sea below. He pulled, and the wind changed directions. The next bolt of lightning strove towards him, stringing itself along the bulbous underside of the storm, traveling far before it burned out. He pulled harder, wanting more, and the lifeforce of the island stirred beneath his feet, seeping through the cracks and crags of the mountainside and using him as a conduit to meet the flighty energies of the sky. The air sizzled audibly around him and the hair stood up on his arms. He bared his teeth and pulled until the clouds themselves dipped low where they passed above him...

A shock of steely cold slammed down like an ocean wave. Lightning struck an instant later, cascading outward in jagged rivers over an invisible dome. Rain followed as if a floodgate had opened, drenching Ben in moments. Whatever had spared him from the lightning was not kind enough to keep him dry.

 _"Well,"_ said a voice he had never heard before. _"I have to admit, that's a creative way to kill yourself. Probably faster than starving to death."_

The curtain of rain was lit blue, cast in the glow of a presence who should not have had any such power over the physical world, but would probably have asked where the physical world got off on telling him what he could and could not do.

He knew the ghost who guarded his dreams, but this was the first he had seen his face clearly. It was a young face, framed by wavy hair much like Ben's own and marked with a narrow, vertical scar. He wore the robes of a traditional Jedi. His expression was gentle, at ease, but his eyes betrayed a spark of humor and a deep, volcanic fire.

"Grandfather."

 _"Hey, kid."_ The spirit waved a hand ungracefully. _"Did you know you were about to get hit by lightning, or were you just being impulsive?"_

"I was..." He broke eye contact, feeling his face tighten. "I don't know what I was doing."

_"Yeah, I thought not."_

Ben had to push rain-soaked hair out of his eyes. The ghost of Anakin Skywalker, meanwhile, was penetrated by the sheets of rain but untouched, existing as a trick of the starlight and a hallucination of sound. Ben envied him.

"Why did you never come when I called?"

_"You know why."_

"Because." He stared hard at the ground, sick with shame. "I was speaking to Darth Vader, not to you."

 _"I am Darth Vader."_ The ghost didn't flinch at his own words as Ben would have—as Ben did any time he thought too long about his other name. _"I did those things. I don't pretend it was some other person. Vader is here."_ He put a hand to his own ethereal chest. _"I wasn't ignoring you just because you used the wrong name."_ A half-smile crossed his face, there and then gone. His expression was sober again when he answered the question. _"Snoke kept me out. I'm sorry."_

"Snoke kept you out?" It was another shock. Snoke had been powerful, dauntingly so, but his grandfather had seemed like a god. It was just one more on his list of delusional expectations.

 _"I could hear you,"_ Anakin went on, _"but I couldn't speak to you. I tried. I really did. Snoke knew I would have made you doubt him."_

Ben felt deflated. Snoke had encouraged him to seek guidance from his Sith ancestor. Snoke had assisted him in acquiring Vader's mask, all for another elaborate ploy, another lie to shape a foolhardy servant. He could imagine the Supreme Leader's smugness at how thriftily he had pulled Kylo Ren’s strings.

Grass was tearing away in his fists. He let it fall and flattened both hands on the ground before him. "Grandfather, what do I do?"

 _"How should I know?"_ There was a puff of noise from the ghost that sounded uncomfortably like a laugh. _"I didn't get this far. Make the most of it, I guess."_

Had it been anyone else, Ben would have been irritated by the casual air. Insulted, even. It was a hard task to reconcile his preconceptions with the reality of the person before him, and the advice he had craved for so long seemed a joke. He couldn't quite blame Anakin for this. Ben was the one who had misjudged. His grandfather was just like him, only Anakin had died trying to set things right. Ben had no right to begrudge him, and no justification for the envy he harbored.

_"Whenever you're done brooding, you should probably get out of the rain. I don't think your guard wants to carry you back if you pass out or something."_

He lurched up off the ground without thinking, his body responding as if to an order. The tangled, soggy grass snagged around his bare feet and nearly cost him a fall, but he caught his balance and straightened. The ghost was fading, flowing back into whatever part of the Force housed him when he was not out chatting with relatives. As soon as the encounter was over and the spirit's light extinguished, it felt as if it had never happened. He expected at any moment to find himself on his pallet, lulled to sleep unknowing by the arrival of the storm.

Only his guard seemed too alive to be a dream, following him in her briskly bobbing lantern light. He would have been content to walk back to his hut in silence, but it was Brell with him, not the stoic Classen. He could feel the rising tension before she spoke. "What was that all about?"

"I was talking to a ghost." Sometimes, Ben had found, honesty was a more effective deterrent than falsehood.

"Of course you were. Don't know why I asked." She said nothing more, and even the rain seemed baffled, slackening as they returned to the path and its silhouettes of stone huts.

Back inside his own, Ben stripped off his wet clothes without ceremony and shivered his way into dry ones. As most of the blankets were tan or brown, all of the clothing was in shades of gray. It was not a distasteful choice. It was even poetic, in its way, though he thought it more likely a matter of dye cost and supply than of any intentional symbolism.

His hair was still dripping and his skin clammy under his clothes. Another blanket staved off the shivering and allowed him sit in some measure of peace. He had no hope of sleeping, but he could let his thoughts drift without delving too deeply, and he could try, even, to nudge a few into new alignment.

.

While it was there, all of them except Luke had taken advantage of the Falcon's sonic shower. In its absence, Ben had to follow his uncle's example and bathe himself in water from one of the wells. He took the little grooming kit with him and shaved, though his focus was elsewhere and he would have cut himself more than once if the razor hadn't been designed to prevent it.

As it was, the only harm he risked was losing himself in the wrong memory. Han had used a kit like this one, functional with or without water and thus suited for long voyages where supply might be slim.

He could not picture his father's clean-shaven face without seeing again that moment on Starkiller Base…

When he was relatively clean and considerably colder, he went looking for Luke. Luke, much to his annoyance, was still asleep, which Ben determined only after he had poked around the cooking hut and the garden and finally resorted to reaching out with the Force.

Put off by his uncle's indulgence and then by his own childish temper, he went instead to the sparring ring and practiced until his mind was blank. Riddled as the island was with surging Force energy, he failed to notice when Luke woke and come to watch him. He was only aware of the company when his exercises brought him around to face the entrance.

Perhaps it was the unexpectedness that opened his mouth before he could clamp down on the impulse. "I saw Grandfather last night."

"I know." Luke seemed to take that as an invitation, sitting down at the edge of the circle as was his habit. "He told me you tried to kill yourself." The words were soft and only mildly critical.

"It was an accident."

"Ah." Ben feared some kind of lecture. When that didn't come, he wondered if Luke would say anything at all. It wasn't until he shifted his weight to move, to go and put his practice blade away, that Luke continued. "We should talk, Ben."

The use of his name made him more uneasy than the suggestion. "I thought that's what we were doing." He tried to sound flippant, but the attempt fell flat.

"You know what I mean."

He had a couple of guesses, and he wasn't looking forward to either prospect. "Do I? It's not as if I've read your mind."

"Come sit down." Luke patted the sand beside him.

"I don't want to talk." This time his voice was strong. The defiance made his heart beat faster and he scolded himself for it. He needed to stop being afraid of his uncle. He was _not_ afraid of his uncle, but...

"I am asking you to."

As if such a request would inspire his obedience. He nearly said as much out loud, but it seemed a weak and useless excuse. As quickly as it had flared, his resolve sputtered and died like a candle in the wind. He sat down.

"I missed you when you were gone."

"Are we doing this now?" His exasperation was on equal footing with his boyish fear. The reconciliation talks were inevitable, under the circumstances, but that wouldn't stop him from wanting to be elsewhere. What could he say? Luke knew why he had done what he'd done. Luke knew he regretted it. Saying it again wouldn't put things back the way they were.

And yet, when Luke asked him if he had a better time in mind, he clamped his mouth shut on any retort he might have made.

"I don't hate you, you know."

"I know." Ben winced at his own response and added, "you should."

"Why? Do you think being hated would make up for what you've done?"

"No, I..." His breath turned solid in his throat. He fidgeted with the wooden sword until he could speak again. "Of course not."

"Then why should I bother?" Luke asked him mildly. "Hating you seems like a waste of energy, to me."

It was, Ben supposed, better than hearing the old, impersonal adage about hate leading to the Dark Side. He tried to let it sink in, to open himself and absorb the implication—that his uncle still wanted to be his uncle—but the weight of it was held off by the lingering buzz of annoyance. "So you don't hate me." It was probably easier for Luke to say so while they were exiled on a lonely island together. "Don't expect me to hug you and weep on your shoulder."

Luke shrugged. "You never did before."

It was meant, Ben thought, to be a humorous comeback. It failed. He ran his fingers down the edge of the practice blade in his lap, checking for splinters, trying to appear preoccupied. "Are we done yet?"

"I don't think we'll be done for a long while, unless you succeed in electrocuting yourself next time."

"You know what I mean."

Luke heaved himself up, looking offensively impassive. "Why don't you help me with breakfast?"

.

Midday found him on the flat stones outside the cooking hut, somewhere between meditation and falling asleep. The restless energy of the morning had burned itself out and left him to his usual melancholy. He was thinking of Rey again, and of his mother. He blamed Luke's talk for the latter.

They were fond of each other, Rey and Leia. Rey had told him so. They had bonded over the death of Han. Rey had not quite had the nerve to tell him that part, but it was implied. He wondered what they would talk about during Rey's visit. Himself, no doubt. And Luke. The idea of them bemoaning his pathetic state left a bad taste in his mouth, and moreso the thought of Leia confiding further tales of his childhood. Those should have been his own to tell.

It was a surprise to realize that he wanted to tell them at all. It should have been too painful to think about, where it wasn't too embarrassing, but if anyone would listen without passing judgment, it was Rey.

Although he flushed at the thought of burdening her with his sob stories, it hadn't all been darkness. There had always been Snoke, but there were days—years, even—when the light shown in almost equal measure.

Ben had had a childhood, however abbreviated. Often it felt like nothing, or certainly not enough, but it had happened, digging stubborn footholds between the agony of his parents' drama and the haunting presence of his master. He had been a boy once, very nearly normal.

He remembered an afternoon of running rampant on the town, just one of a pack of children, dumping his mother's credits into the candy store and the arcade, winning a wrestling match and losing a footrace at the park. He'd come home absolutely flushed with victory, regaling his mother with the day's adventures while they snacked on sandwiches. It had not been a unique event, but something of it stood out to him in memory, a perfect chain of joyful moments. He remembered the dining room filled with evening sunlight and the stickiness of jam on his fingertips.

He was drifting away on the pleasant memory, his train of thought scattering like leaves on the ground, crumbling to nothing when Luke said his name.

"There's a call for you."

He blinked at his uncle's dim figure in the doorway, then scrambled up to follow him inside. The only person he could think of who would call him was Rey. She must have wanted to check on him, or to chat about some trivial delight. He could already picture her smile...

It wasn't her.

A portable holo communicator was set up in the center of the table, looking lonely and small on the long slab of wood. This was the first time Ben had seen the device, but he knew that Luke had been using it to keep Leia informed. He should have expected sooner or later that she would ask for him.

The holo was facing the wall, arranged so that one could sit at the long side of the table and speak comfortably. Leia was projected in profile, staring patiently at the empty space where Ben would have to sit if he wanted to be seen. She looked composed and pristine, barely tense, but she had always had a talent for hiding her worries.

When Ben didn’t move, Luke put a metallic hand on his shoulder. "She's worried about you." He said it quietly, perhaps to prevent his twin from overhearing. "She doesn't believe me when I tell her you're alright."

"I'm not _alright._ " Ben snarled the words, wanting to rip his uncle's throat out for setting this trap. "I'll never be alright. Do you want me to tell her that?"

Luke had the look on his face that Ben was learning to dread, all watery eyes and tight-lipped frown. "As loudly as you said it, I don't think you have to, now."

Ben dared a glance back at the holo and regretted it. His mother's eyes were closed, as if she could shut out the audio by not looking. Ben wanted to shout, and he wasn't sure whether he should direct it at Luke or at himself. She would worry more now. She would talk to Rey and it would kill Rey's smile, or she would keep it to herself and drown in it.

Pressure built in Ben's shoulders, aching, and he released it with a sweep of his arm. The holo flew into the wall, smashing itself to lifeless pieces.

Luke didn't scold him. Luke didn't say a word.

That, he thought, was the worst part.


	6. To Cast Off Doubt

The Millennium Falcon sailed in an hour before sunset on the fourth day since its departure. Ben had failed to sleep for the second night in a row, and chosen to remain secluded in his hut that day rather than trying to distract himself with physical activity. There had been no further visitations from his grandfather, and Luke kept his distance after a few failed attempts at offering a meal.

Ben needed this. His meditation on the island so far had been focused outward, afraid to set mental foot in the ruins of the storm, but it needed to be done. He knew that. It was better to have it done now than to risk losing control while Rey was present.

That was the theory, in any case. It might have been a flawed one.

His mind was not so raw as it had been in the cell. The island may have had something to do with that. The haunted absence of Snoke still chafed him, but it was a low, quiet unease and not the raging force it had been. He hoped that if he exposed himself to it long enough, under careful mental guard, he might simply grow used to it and forget it was there. An optimistic hope, to be sure, but it was better than continuing to live in dread and grief over a loss he should have celebrated.

He was stronger than he had been. A day without food and two without sleep were annoyances, but only that. It was not the first time he had deprived himself for better reasons than suicide. His training under Snoke had included such measures on a semi-regular basis. If one subjected oneself to suffering, one could keep fight when suffering was inflicted by others. He had merely been less prepared for it so soon after the devastating battle. The days on the island had offered him a chance to heal, at least physically.

As for mentally and emotionally, well, determining that was the point of the exercise.

It was a trying experience, exploring the ruins of that hole in his mind, but he retained control, distanced himself, kept careful count of his breathing, his tether to the world outside....

And then all of that control dropped away when the Falcon broke atmosphere.

He had to stop himself from shaking as he emerged from his hut and hurried to the field on legs that felt boneless. The battered old craft looked like a spirit itself, too perfect in all its dents and scorch marks. Time moved dreamlike, too long between the ship touching down and the ramp lowering, too many heartbeats spent wondering if she would ever come out.

And then she was there, solid and real.

Luke ambled past him to receive a hug, and Ben caught himself startled by the reminder that there was life on the island other than himself and Rey. Then Chewbacca loomed into view and gave Luke the same greeting while Rey stepped around them. She was looking at Ben, catching his eye, and then she was coming his way, coming closer and closer and not stopping until she was close enough to touch.

"You look terrible.” She smiled as if she had told a joke. "Did you get any sleep?"

He wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to scoop her up and spin her around, to delight in the simple reality of her presence. He wanted to grab her face and kiss her. He did none of these things. He stood stiffly and answered her question. "A little."

Rey snorted—a sound not torn between the aspects of amusement and exasperation, but appreciative of their harmony. And there, her hand came up to straighten the collar of his shirt, a simple, short gesture, as much a commentary on his bedraggled appearance as it was a show of affection. It left him breathless all the same. He was sure, for a moment, that she would hug him the way she had hugged Luke. He was sure, also, that if she didn't hurry up and do it, he would be the one to catch her up in his arms, and then he would never find the strength to let go.

Instead, he stepped back. If he didn't touch her now, if he kept a hold of himself until time had eased his longing, until he had reacclimated to her presence, perhaps he could get by without clinging to her like the world was at an end.

Which was, of course, when she grabbed his hand. "Come with me."

There was no arguing, even with himself. He followed her as one followed an order. He was only belated aware that Brell had taken up her place behind them—a gross failing of his alertness, but the sleep deprivation might have had been to blame for that.

Rey..."

"Shh. Come with me," she said again, taking him onto the stone path. "I gave Finn and Poe and Rose your message."

"Ah." He didn't know what she wanted him to say. He could not begin to guess what sort of conversation she had in mind that would entail privacy, or a walk around the island, or whatever it was they were doing. Perhaps she was just restless.

"They were happy to hear it."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Well, they weren't mad."

Ben huffed, but her optimism was endearing. "Did you see my mother?"

"Yeah. A lot. She's worried about you."

That went without saying. She had likely never stopped worrying about him. He had given her more than enough reason, even as a boy. He caught himself fantasizing while they walked about what his life might have been like—and hers—if he had never been gifted or cursed with the Force. "Is she well?" It was a stupid question. Of course she wasn't well. Not really. Not after the display Ben had made over the holo, and not before.

"She's busy," Rey answered. Ben took it as a negative. "Everyone says she works too hard. I think she's okay now that we're winning, though."

"Winning?"

"The fight," Rey said, "against the First Order."

That made him still, and then lurch forward to keep up when she kept walking. "We haven't won?" He felt a brush of awkwardness at including himself in the question, but neither she nor the guard commented on it.

"The First Order hasn't surrendered yet, but they will. Without you or Snoke, they've got nothing left."

"The First Order existed without me," he said, deeply alarmed by the news. He had assumed... but it was arrogance, he realized, to think that he had ended it all by cutting down Snoke. "A military power doesn't need a Force user."

Rey squeezed his hand. "They're on their last legs. Trust me, we'll get them."

He couldn't share her confidence. He tried, but the feeling hung false and out of place in his chest. The Resistance, from what he had seen, was as run down as its enemy.

When he didn't offer a verbal response, Rey let the subject drop. She was still leading him with a purpose, though he had given up trying to predict where they were going. She had stepped off the path and was weaving behind a row of empty huts, forging confidently through the untended underbrush. At last they came to a crumbling wall, and behind it, a stretch of ground that sloped gently before dropping off into the ravine. The view caught him by surprise, suddenly expansive and filled with light. Below them, he could see the path where it curved off towards the water, and the woods where he had collected firewood and followed ghosts. If he craned his head to the left, he could make out the edge of the sparring arena. Beyond it and below, the sea was brisk and white-capped, shadowed on the horizon by another storm.

Rey let go of his hand.

She sat with her knees bent in front of her, gazing out over the jagged hillside. Ben glanced over his shoulder, noting that Brell had made herself comfortable with her back to the ruined wall. She seemed to be giving them their privacy as much as she could under her obligation as warden. Ben sat down beside Rey and mimicked her pose.

"I don't really know how to do this." There was a funny sort of tension in the air. Ben tilted his head and studied the lines of her face, trying to read her without using the Force. "There weren't a lot of opportunities on Jakku."

"What are you talking about?"

"That..." She had a pinched look of concentration about her, almost pleading, as if she expected him to find the words for her. "What happened with Snoke. I mean, before the fight. And when you were injured..."

Ben's stomach twisted. She was talking about the kiss, and the words he had said. She was going to tell him that she couldn't be around him anymore, that she couldn't be his friend, knowing that he wanted more. She was going to distance herself and leave him with another void to drown in. He sucked in a breath and tried to steel himself, to put on a brave face for her sake, doubting that it would hold long enough to get out of her sight...

"I think I... want to try that again."

The words didn't register. Ben kept staring at her, waiting to hear her gentle rejection. She moved her legs, tucked them underneath her, and he thought then that she would stand before she said it, the quicker to retreat afterwards. Instead, she picked herself up on her knees and kissed him.

It was chaste and brief. Her lips were not warm as he remembered, chilled and chapped by Ahch-To's wind and the dryness of space. She pulled back and looked into his eyes and Ben waited for her to tell him that it was a goodbye kiss.

"... Is this okay?"

He blinked.

"Can I do it again?"

She lifted a hand, reached for his face, and the reality of it hit him like a wall of bricks. He slapped her hand away and scrambled out of reach, leaving her to stare at him in open-mouthed confusion.

His heart felt like it would tear its way, bloody, out of his ribcage.

For too long, they were locked there, trying to make sense of each other without touching by hand or by thought. Finally, Ben found his voice.

"No. Rey... No. You don't—don't do this… because you feel _sorry_ for me." It came out croaking, distorted by the tension in his mouth. It felt like handing her the hilt of a lightsaber and holding it to his chest. Rey's face changed, dawning with sorrow and horror...

And then anger. "I don't! Ben, that's not why! Why can't you just..." She smothered that sentence with a growl. What escaped instead, muttered between gritted teeth, was a wit's end confession of "I actually like you, you idiot."

She was lying. She was deluding herself. She had to be. He was torn apart all over again, wanting her close but not wanting to condemn her to such a fate. He needed to get up and leave. He needed to give her space, to show her that she didn't have to play this game. She didn't need to waste herself on him. She had gotten her head twisted around at that wedding. She was being kind. She was acting out of sympathy, not love, and she wasn't thinking about what she wanted. How could she want him? What could he offer her but misery and isolation?

He needed to walk away. He was going to. His hand was braced on the ground and his legs were tense, ready to stand up and go. Any second now, he would work up the nerve...

"Don't."

She reached for him again, then stopped, her hand suspended in the air between them. He stayed where he was. Rey's eyes narrowed, her mouth twisted—and then she pressed against his mind.

He let her in.

The thoughts she sent were half-formed, scattered words and a confusion of feelings. She did not have the single-mindedness he did. There was not the desperation nor the obsession. He had not expected either from her, and he did not want it. He knew those things were one-sided.

But there was... concern, and not of a distant sort. There was care. There was trust. She genuinely liked being around him. He made her feel safe—which was absurd, given their history. More absurdly, she felt that he needed her in a way that no one else did. She needed to be needed. She had been unwanted for too long.

Ben swallowed a noise, almost a groan, and swayed where he sat. That sense of abandonment— _Rey's_ abandonment—was a fishhook in his gut, yanking him almost physically toward her. The need she harbored was a match for his after all, though it was not a need for him. It did not carry his face behind it as his own carried hers. Rey needed someone to want her, to see value in more than just her strength with the Force. Rey needed to be loved for the sake of love, and Ben would love her. She knew that.

If Ben loved her, she could love him back. That was her belief.

With that message delivered, she pulled out of his thoughts, but she left her walls open. He felt it from two opposite perspectives, his own and hers, when she kissed him again.

Ben's head was spinning. His eyes refused to function, or perhaps they were closed and he didn’t know it. When she was done with him, he made himself stand up.

"You don't need me." His voice hitched over the statement, but he held firm, somehow.

"Ben..."

Her voice shook him. Breathing in slow, he drew his inner shadows around him, cloaking himself in their familiarity. Misery felt like home to him. He knew how to sustain himself there. It was easier to function without the uncertainty of hope. "Your friends want you for more than just your strength in the Force. Finn... and my mother. Even Luke."

"I know."

"You don't need me." He must have made some great oversight in letting her come this far believing otherwise.

"I want you, though."

"Rey..."

Rey stood up, but didn't touch him.

He could have argued that he was worthless, that he would only waste her time, but Rey would never have listened to that. Her optimism would be her downfall. He compromised. "Please just... give me time." That was something she would listen to—a request for a kind act. A plea. She would give him that, though what he really wanted was to give her that time, that chance to reconsider. He had selfishly thought that he needed her close, that he needed her light, and he couldn't convince himself otherwise now, but he was afraid—deeply, horrifically afraid—that in holding her too tightly, he would be the one to smother her flame.

Sparing her would be an act of redemption.

"Okay." She sounded disappointed, but willing. "I'm sorry."

He wanted to refuse her apology, but he couldn't speak. He couldn’t weave the lie any further. His legs were too stiff to walk away, so he turned his back and bowed his head, making a wall of his shoulders. He waited for her to leave.

She was still a moment, testing his resolve, and then he heard her footsteps in retreat. They paused somewhere near the wall and she said, a bit morosely, "at least come to dinner. I brought leftovers."

He didn't offer an agreement. He didn't know what to say. Rey walked away.

.

He would have skipped dinner if she had not asked him so plainly to come. He couldn't bring himself to disappoint her further. By the time he slunk into the cooking hut, Rey was talking animatedly over a plate heaped with galactic delicacies. How the struggling Resistance had managed to splurge on such fair for a soldier's wedding, Ben could only imagine. It paid to be favored by the General, he supposed.

In an effort not to stare at Rey, he observed instead the interaction between the guards. Classen was leaning against the wall by the door, and the eagerness with which he caught Brell's eye suggested that he had been waiting specifically for her.

"Well?"

Brell made a sour face and handed him a stack of credits. "He turned her down. You win." Then, horrifically, Classen went to Luke, who dug into some hidden pocket of his robe and offered a similar pay-off.

"Too bad the General's not a gambling person," Classen lamented.

"Oh, she is," Luke assured. "But she prefers card games."

"You're kidding."

"Never bet against her at sabacc."

Resigned to a humiliating evening, Ben sat down, keeping his eyes on the table as much as he was able and his mind locked firmly against stray thoughts. Rey, in spite of all her apparent cheer, was taking care not to look at him overtly, although he caught her at more than a few sidelong glances.

"Do a little more than stare at it, Ben," Luke advised. "You haven't eaten all day."

"What?" Rey's voice was loud across the table, her attempts to avoid eye-contact abandoned. "You're not eating? I thought you were done with that."

"It was for meditation..." He felt as if he were being scolded by his mother, as if Rey had carried some part of Leia back with her. He resisted the urge to hunch his shoulders and make himself look smaller.

"It better have been.” She didn’t sound convinced, but after taking a breath and visibly struggling to relax her jaw, she added, “Try the meat. I don't know what it is, but they smoked it, and there's pepper and... and it's really good." This offering of friendly conversation fell away into a mumble, and Ben only felt more ashamed of himself. He tried the meat.

The body of the dinner conversation passed with Brell and occasionally Classen or Luke prompting Rey for details about the wedding. When his stomach was sated, Ben found himself drifting, one long blink away from falling asleep at the table. While Rey was engrossed in describing an X-wing flyover, he retreated to the emptiness of his hut.

.

He had fallen unconscious as soon as his head hit the pallet, but was woken only a short time later, not by a nightmare, but by Rey.

"I can't sleep." She was hugging her blankets to her chest. "Can I stay here?"

To refuse would be to condemn her to a sleepless night, and likely himself as well. This, perhaps, would be one of those regrettable, mad decisions made for the sake of sleep, but he nodded. "Fine."

Rey unrolled her blankets beside his and made herself comfortable. She was careful not to touch him, but she was near. She was near enough that he could feel her breath tickling the hair on his arm, near enough to make his heart swell dangerously in his chest. He fought to contain the feeling and take comfort from it, rather than to mourn what had been sacrificed. He made an exercise of matching his breath with hers, of distracting himself with the simple repetition, and eventually the heaviness of sleep returned.

.

When Ben woke, it was slowly—a sensation he was not used to. Equally unusual was the clear-headedness of a full night's sleep. Rey was still beside him, still not touching, but close enough that he imagined he could feel the heat of her body. It was an effort not to sit and simply stare, to drag himself away instead and stagger outside with the excuse of going to relieve himself.

When he returned, Rey had curled into a tight ball, disturbed by tiny spasms of shivering. He knelt and pulled up the top blanket from his own pallet, tucking it over her huddled form. Only afterward did he go stiff with the worry that she might wake.

She moved, but only to snuggle tighter into the blankets and make a faint, sleepy sound. Ben held his breath, but she had stilled, and the softness of her sleeping face drew the tension like poison from his shoulders. Unthinking, spurred by a sentimental impulse, he bent forward and touched his lips to the soft hair above her ear.

Her head turned.

The flutter of her eyelashes was hypnotic, dreamlike, too graceful a motion to belong in his reality. Then her face scrunched up and tightened, a protest against waking, and she was the only real thing in the galaxy.

She blinked up at him and he stared unblinking, too close, inches from her face and afraid to move.

Rey's smile was so sweet he could have cursed her for it. She reached up, holding him trapped in that smile, and pushed away the tangled strands of hair that clung to his forehead. When he didn't move, she didn't stop, fingertips drawing lines of heat across his brow until his chest ached and a cottony warmth filled him up inside.

He wetted his lips with his tongue and failed to think of a single thing to say.

Rey's hand slowed, then stopped, and something like guilt darkened her face. "You're sure I can't kiss you again?"

Ben breathed in shakily, breathed out, and sat up straight. Rey followed him, letting the blanket pool in her lap.

"Ben?"

He stayed where he was, and Rey... Rey was the one who moved, tipping forward across that tiny distance between them and pressing her lips to his.

Some squabbling thought in the corner of his mind told him to push her away. His hand went to her face instead, cupping her cheek, keeping her there as he parted his lips and kissed her hungrily.

It was clumsy and sour from sleep, but Rey made no protest, and Ben could not have cared less. His chest was so full he feared he might weep, or die, or fall out of time and space altogether. He was bursting with her Light, every shadow banished to the farthest edges of himself. He wondered where this feeling had been the day before—how he could possibly have denied her, no matter how many stubborn doubts still festered.

Rey moved, curving her body into the hollow of his, pressing closer, bringing her arms up around his neck and sinking her fingers into his sleep-mussed hair. She was opening her mind to him, walls sliding away, and he took the invitation, pouring out everything he had held back before. Of course she was needed. Of course she was wanted, and not just for her talent with the Force, or her skill with a saber. The light he coveted was in her smile and her laughter and her touch. It was in her eyes and her voice and the simple joys she took from the world around her. It was in her kindness and her forgiveness. If all of the Force locked itself away in that moment, if its capricious Light never touched her again, he would still need her. What good had the Force ever done for him anyway?

He could feel Rey fortifying herself on what he gave her. When she at last brought the kiss to an end, her eyes were damp. She bit her lip before she spoke. "I don't know why you think I'd be special, without the Force."

His hand was still on her cheek. He stroked away a drop of water caught suspended in her lashes. "Why not?"

"I was just a scavenger. I wasn't worth anyone's time."

Ben shook his head in disbelief, surprised to catch himself smiling. "Why am I worth your time?"

"Because...!" She stopped, catching on to his point, and continued with resignation. "Because there's good in you, as a person... and I care about you."

He brushed his lips over hers again, fleeting. "You're a far better person than I am. I wish I knew how to be like you."

Rey lunged forward and kissed him hard, almost bruising, and in the clean simplicity of the morning, he forgot why he had resisted her at all.


	7. One Thousand Shining Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. I don’t like to clutter up every chapter with notes, but I want you all to know, I check for reviews multiple times a day, and every word of feedback is a delight. Writing does not come easily to me. I’ve struggled with it ever since a setback several years ago, and this is one of the first stories I’ve felt confident about. Thank you so, so much for your support.

.

 

After rather a lot of kissing and holding, too new and pure to spoil with words, it was Rey who detached herself, put on her boots, and stood up. "I told Luke I was going to make breakfast." There was a little upward turn at the corner of her mouth that wouldn’t go away. "I want to try something Finn showed me."

Ben went with her to the cooking lodge. There, at the entrance, she put her hands on his shoulders and turned them both so that he stood in the shadow of the doorway and she in the morning sun. "Wait here. I need to get some things." She hesitated, then gave him a parting kiss, leaving him blinking after her as she strode away.

The air was thick and dewy, as it was every morning on Ahch-To. Ben filled his lungs with it, bolstering himself on the salt-scented cold. He ignored Classen's stare and the predictable statement of "I see you two made up."

Rey came back hauling one of the well buckets stuffed to the brim with packets of food. Chewbacca came behind her carrying more. Ben suffered a jolt of panic when Chewie met his eyes, but the wookiee said nothing, only waited for Rey to slip inside and drop off her burden before returning to free him of his. She patted his hairy arm, promised to send him a plate, and then put herself close at Ben's side in what felt like a show of defense. When Chewbacca's back was to them and growing smaller up the way to the Falcon, Rey nudged Ben with her shoulder and went inside. "Come on. I'm making pancakes."

Ben obeyed, feeling useless on a number of levels, watching as she arranged her ingredients and started mixing them directly into the bucket. Apparently there wasn't a bowl big enough for the task. "Finn showed you how to make pancakes?"

"Uhuh." She was stirring in pale blue milk from a jug.

"Where did Finn learn this?" He was fairly certain it had not been included in the Stormtrooper's basic training.

"Rose’s sister taught him. And he made, um... a pie with cheese and berries. It was really good."

"Can I help?"

"You can get the plates out."

Luke's dinnerware was stored in a low rectangular chest and comprised of an eccentric mix of hand-carved wooden dishes and ugly gray trays. The latter reminded Ben of the ones he had been served meals on in his cell. Surplus from a military barracks, he guessed, or something equivalent. The utensils and cups were equally mismatched.

He set out enough to feed everyone and handed an extra plate to Rey when she asked. This she took to the oven, along with her bucket and a frying pan and spatula brought from the Falcon. Luke's oven, rather ingeniously, had a removable top, making space for use of the open fire. Ben still would have preferred something that ran on a power source other than wood, but it was a creative adaptation for lack of more advanced technology.

He watched Rey fuss over the arrangement of everything in her small workspace, plainly still in the experimental phase of the project. "Is there anything else I can do?"

"Sit back and be patient," she recommended. "I'm not going to burn myself, if that's what you're worried about."

"I didn't say that."

"Good, because I'm not the one who cuts their hands pulling weeds."

"It wasn't a weed," he grumbled, wondering if teasing was the price he paid for kissing. "It was the tree trimmers."

"What?" She shot him a hard look over her shoulder. "No, it was the weeds. We weren't using trimmers."

Ben pressed his lips together. She had meant the first time, with her, and not the incident which had occurred in her absence, meaning she didn't know about that. Or she hadn't, at least, until he babbled like an idiot.

She was still staring at him. "Are you okay?"

He opted to keep his mouth shut and nod, hoping she would think he had spoken in confusion. It seemed a fair excuse. He was mentally unstable and traumatized, after all, and it had been a busy morning.

Rey hunched over the oven, poking at her in-progress pancake more than was probably necessary. "... Sometimes," she said in a distracted sort of tone, "the insulation would be stripped off a wreck before all the valuable bits were taken out. By a novice, or someone in a hurry." An image of heat waves over desert sand came to Ben's mind. It was a memory, but not his own. "You'd get cooked if you spent too long in those ships."

"Did you try?"

"Sometimes, if I was desperate." There was a false lightness to those words which made the underlying weight of them all the more evident. He knew it had been hard for her on Jakku. He had seen scattered images of it, gleaned from every time their minds touched. It was as prominent a part of her life as Snoke had been of his own. One day, maybe, she would tell him the whole of it.

For now, he let silence set in, save for the sounds of her cooking. He closed his eyes and tried, not for the first time, to determine if the morning thus far had been a dream. It was tempting to think of it that way. In a dream, he was not responsible for his own actions.

"Don't fall asleep." Perhaps he had, because Rey suddenly had a stack of finished pancakes on her spare plate and was scraping two of them onto his, then waving her spatula at the array of food supplies. "There's butter and fruit preserves, if you want. I don't know what kind of fruit, but it's good." She piled another two pancakes onto a second plate and offered them to the guard. "Here, try some."

Classen took the plate without a word and stood with his back against the wall, eating the pancakes plain. Rey didn’t seem to take offense at this, busy dishing out servings on the remaining three plates. One of these she made significantly larger than the others. Ben assumed it was for Chewbacca, but given her way about food, he wouldn’t be surprised if she took it for herself.

Luke made his entrance while Ben was delicately coating his pancakes in preserves. Rey sent him away again with the extra large portion for Chewie, and then sat down next to Ben with her own. "Is it that good?" The question was directed at Classen, who had annihilated most of his serving already.

"Not bad," he said around a swallow. "Not fluffy enough."

Rey appeared to consider this critique as she doctored her own serving, taking opposite of the route Classen had and piling on every topping available. Ben was still dawdling over his second bite, savoring it. The preserves clung to his tongue, unexpectedly tangy. It had been a long time since he indulged in sweets.

"Well?" When she turned her head to look at him, she was so close he had to lean back to read her face.

He chewed awhile before he spoke. "... I think Finn should teach you more recipes." Rey beamed at this, and as very close as she was, he couldn't resist placing a kiss on her brow.

She wrinkled her nose in the way he loved, still grinning. "Your lips are sticky. That was disgusting."

"I am a monster," he drawled. "Aren't monsters supposed to be disgusting?"

"Stop it." She kissed him soundly. Then, startling him, she flicked out her tongue to lick the corner of his mouth. Presumably it was to capture some trace of food, scavenger that she was, but Ben was equal parts alarmed and entranced by the gesture. There was little to do for it but kiss her again.

"I take it back," Classen muttered. "This is way too fluffy."

.

"Leia sent a gift for you." Rey had told him this over breakfast and Ben had ignored her. She brought it up again while he was helping her clean the dishes. "I can go and get it if you don't want to bother Chewie."

"If you want." Ben did _not_ want, but Rey was plainly curious, or at least she thought it important that he receive the gift as soon as possible. He would let her have it her way. There was nothing he wanted to deny her that day.

He wasn't long waiting. When she met him in the relative privacy of his hut, she was carrying a sturdy rectangular lockbox. This she set down in the middle of the dirt floor and moved out of the way, reciting the lock code for him. She had to say it a second time, then, because he hadn't been ready.

When the box opened under his hand, he was met with a jumbled gallery of his childhood. There was a model ship he had kept on a shelf in his bedroom. There was his favorite holo novel, a fanciful tale of pirates and an ancient Jedi treasure. Beside it, a transparent orb made to fit in a child's palm. He picked this out reverently and rolled it in his hand. It was smaller than he remembered.

"What's that?"

Instead of answering aloud, Ben grasped both ends of the marble and twisted it along a seam that defined the middle. Gloriously, the thing bloomed to life, flooding the domed room with a wash of projected stars.

Rey's face lit with an open-mouthed grin. "What's it a map of?"

"It's not." He balanced the toy between his fingers and traced a delicate line over its surface. The starry projection blurred and a purplish nebula painted itself through the air behind him.

Rey gasped.

Ben drew another line and a second streak of color inserted itself above their heads, this one gradiating from yellow to green. Next, he tapped five points with the barest tip of his finger and five new bright stars appeared.

Rey was in breathless delight. "What's it for?"

"It's a toy."

"Can I try?"

He passed it into her eager hands and she swiped two quick lines across it, whipping her head around to follow the corresponding nebulae as they flared to life. At his instruction, she twisted it again to enlarge the projection, filling the hut with a single cloud of rose-colored light. With taps of her fingers, she built constellations, smiling like a child-god. Ben saw her excitement and thought of a time when, as a boy, he would fly his model ship through a custom starscape, daydreaming adventures of smuggling and hidden treasure.

Damp-eyed suddenly, he went back to sifting through the box's contents while Rey entertained herself. There was a holo album he recognized and was afraid to look into. There was a scrappy piece of cloth, a red scarf that had been part of his smuggler costume, useless now and too sentimental even by his standards. His mother should have kept it. He considered returning it to her.

Underneath that, there was a piece of folded flimsi. Nervous, he pinched the top fold and lifted it enough to glimpse inside. There, not entirely to his surprise, was his mother's careful, rarely used handwriting.

Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then picked up the letter and smoothed it between his hands. Eventually, he worked up the nerve to read it.

 

 

_Son,_

_Before you were born, when I carried you inside me, I knew already_  
the person you would be. I knew that you would be bold and willful,   
witty and keen-minded. I knew there would burn a fire in your blood,   
a passion, and that you would fight for it with everything you are.

_When you were young, I smiled to see my vision manifest. Even in_  
hard times, even when I knew you were unhappy, I could see that   
fire in you and I knew that it would carry you through.

_Then Snoke cast his net, and I watched your fire dim and die._

_I am so sorry, my son, that I did not do more. I knew what Snoke  
wanted, but I underestimated the threat. There is no other excuse. _

_I failed you._

_I wish that we could both go back to a time before a all that. I wish_  
that we could do it over again. I wish I had a chance to do it right,   
but such wishing leads to nothing except wasted time. My only joy in   
life is knowing that you made it out. Your fire relit from the embers   
and you fought your way to the other side, in spite of all that was lost   
on the way. I am proud of you. I want you to know that. You came   
back to me, and I am so, so proud. I hope one day that you will be able   
to look me in the eyes again and know that I love you. 

_Until that time comes, be well. And listen to Rey. She's a wise girl._

_\- Leia Organa Solo_

 

  
Ben let his hands fall into his lap, the letter with them. There were lines of wetness on his face. He couldn't be bothered to wipe them away.

"What does it say?" Rey's voice was too gentle, too wary of harming him further. He shook his head. And then, as if that simple motion had broken his defenses, he doubled over and wept.

She was there in an instant, wrapping herself over the slope of his back, shielding him, holding his broken pieces together. She stayed like that a long time, simply holding him, until the sobs he tried to stifle turned to quiet, ragged gasps, and then to nothing. When he was finished, she held on a little longer, then sat up and let him go.

"Better?"

The question was jarring, too simple for the circumstances, but it stirred him enough to uncurl and to check what damage he had done to his mother's letter. It was crinkled, but whole, and he put it away with stiff hands before he could do any worse to it.

Rey was sitting beside him still, waiting. Eventually she asked him, "should I go?"

"No."

More timidly, "can you look at me?"

He did. She brought both hands to his face to brush away the tear tracks, and then she didn't stop. Her thumbs traced the lines of his cheekbones, slowly, again and again. Her calloused fingertips explored the curve of his jaw, earlobe to chin. He could only watch her and let her do as she liked until, at one point, she faltered, tensing minutely, and lifted her hand away from his cheek. "Sorry. I didn't... is this okay?"

"What?"

"Your scar. I won't touch it if..."

He caught her hand and pressed his face to it, pressed his ruined cheek into her palm. "You put it there. It's yours."

"I'm sorry."

"You were defending yourself." He remembered the look of her standing in the snow, in the dark of a dying sun, lit blue by his grandfather's lightsaber. He remembered how, before that moment, he had been merely intrigued by her. From that moment on, he was enchanted.

"I wanted to kill you," she said.

"You didn't."

She ran her fingers along the thickest part of the scar, from cheek to jaw and back, mapping the ridged and misshapen skin. "Does it hurt?"

"No." It was numb in places. There had been some nerve damage that bacta couldn’t fix. He didn't tell her that.

When she had satisfied her curiosity over the grotesque relic of their battle, she kissed his forehead, rested her lips on the stray end of the scar there, and then pulled back to meet his gaze. "Are you better now?"

He closed his eyes on a rueful smile. "I might be."

"Okay. Good enough." She sat quiet a moment. Then, perhaps not knowing what else to do, she put her arms around his neck for one more quick hug. "... I like your star toy."

"You can have it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." He had no intention of using it himself, except for her amusement.

"How about we share it? I'm sleeping in your hut anyway."

"If you want."

She leaned back in to plant a kiss on his lips. "Thanks, Ben. You're sweet."

The gesture was sweet, but her words left a bitter taste in his mouth. "No, I'm not."

She gave him a wide-eyed, frank look. "It's what your mother says about you, when you were little."

"That was before, and she's my mother."

"And this is after. You're sweet."

"If you say so."

Rey dropped the subject. She gave up on conversation altogether, fitting herself across his lap like an overgrown Loth-cat, leaning into his chest and letting him hold her and twine his fingers through her hair. He realized after a while that she might have been trying to prove her claim, but he could hardly mind. She was warm and soft in his arms. He could feel her heartbeat and the slight heave of her chest when she sighed, and all around them the air was still rose-clouded and lit with artificial stars.

When she left him, it was with a kiss and a word about checking on Luke. Ben motivated himself to stand a few minutes after, to put away his childhood belongings and to wander out into the hazy sunlight.

With his thoughts on meditating in the brisk air, he ended up on one of the well-used paving stones outside the cooking lodge. On a nicer day, it would have been warm from soaking in the daylight, but Ahch-To's wind and cold earth had already stripped away what the sun could give. Ben was already weary of his island prison's weather.

It was not, however, enough to drive him back inside. He sat in the cold and let his mind sort through the day's events. He was almost getting used to this process of revelation and reorder. At the same time, he wondered how much of it he could take. Every day since Snoke's death brought new truths with it, or crushed long-held beliefs. It felt as if the whole of his life was being rewritten, or that he was reading it from a new perspective. His waking had been a slow one, beginning with his father’s death and ending with Snoke’s, and yet the shock of it kept returning, or perhaps it had never ceased. He was still waking up—still processing his reality. He felt at once disconnected and too close, and he feared that if one more false truth came undone, it might undo him with it. He needed time. He needed a chance to breathe it in, to convince his heart and soul of what his waking mind knew—that it was over, really and truly. That Kylo Ren was dead. That he had ended that life when he ended Snoke's, and that whatever followed was something new… or that it could be, if he let it.

If time and space were what it took to make himself believe this, then maybe his mother had known what she was doing when she arranged his exile.

Rey came back to him less than an hour later. She had a sense of nervous restraint about her. He got the impression that she had been trying to give him time alone, and that she had wanted to come back sooner.

Regardless of her wants, she was straight to business. "Luke thinks we should train together. Fighting, I mean. He wants to know if you're ready."

"I..." Ben composed himself, managing a hint of a smile to lighten his answer. "I don't think I can be ready, but I did say I would teach you."

She grinned and waited for him to stand. This time, it was he who caught and held her hand.

.

Luke was sitting on the edge of the sand ring with a pair of wooden swords beside him. Ben indulged in a flash of annoyance at his uncle for presuming that he would agree. As if Luke had not expected it at all, he turned his head at their entrance and said, "ah. She convinced you?"

Ben kept his face bland. "Rey needs it."

Luke matched his expression, perhaps unintentionally. "That's what she said about you."

Rey tugged on his arm. "Come on, we both do." When he resisted her, she shrugged and went out to the center of the ring on her own to stretch. Ben watched her a while, forgetting himself until Luke cleared his throat and it occurred to him that he ought to join her.

When Rey decided that they were sufficiently warmed up, she retrieved the practice blades and tossed one to Ben. There was no verbal warning, but her intent was clear in that sixth sense they shared, and Ben easily snatched the weapon out of the air and spun it into his favored low-slung position. Rey raised hers high at her right shoulder, breathed into the stance, and came at him.

She started lightly. Flirting. Testing him. Measuring him. They had fought side by side against Snoke, but they had never faced off against each other without intent to do harm. There was a discordance to it, despite the change being a positive one. He wondered if she felt it too.

He let her have the offensive, focused on fending her off, making a feint here and there but not pressing the attack. Rey seemed to enjoy herself, and he would have been content to leave it at that, but she kept pushing him harder, moving faster, matching her speed against his strength. She would swoop in for a well-aimed strike, cross blades briefly, and then skip out of range. She would give him an opening, luring him in a step or two before he remembered himself and stopped, readying for her next attack.

When this cycle had repeated too many times, he surrendered and gave her what she wanted. Rey bared her teeth, grinning when he stepped in to meet her, locking blades with an overhead swing. She slid out of it and snaked her sword around for a slice at his side. He knocked it away untouched and came at her again, exchanged a few quick blows and then pinned her in another lock. Rey was stronger than she looked, but Ben's height and muscle were things she would never match. He watched her strain underneath him, felt her testing him, looking for a way out without exposing herself. He bore down on her, dolling out his strength carefully and almost, possibly, arguably beginning to have fun. Then Rey made a too-desperate dive out of the way and he overextended, couldn't pull the strike enough to miss her completely. His wooden blade grazed her shoulder and she came away looking sobered and sore.

Ben dropped his stance and very nearly dropped his weapon. "I'm sorry." It was hard to say those words because it was too easy. He had to stop himself from saying them over and over again, every time.

Rey had kept her guard up, ready for more, but let it fall when Ben stayed where he was. "I'm fine. Are you okay?"

"Yes." He was confused by the question. She had been the one hit, not him.

She brought her sword back up and widened her stance, ignoring the reddening bruise on her shoulder. "Can we go again?"

He should have refused her.

Rey was more cautious this time, taking on the defensive and leaving him to make the first move. Warily, he stepped in and engaged. Each blow she caught, and each flowed into the next, forcing her back a step at a time until he had her at the edge of the ring. His vision was narrowing, going dark around the edges, and he should have stopped, but he didn’t, seduced by the rhythm of blow after blow. The cold wind brought snow to mind, and the colors of the world around him seemed duller and darker, somehow. He looked at Rey and he couldn't be sure if he was seeing patient concentration on her face, or fear.

There was a pressure at the back of his skull, vice-like, spurring him, driving him. There was a sick tension in his muscles that demanded more, harder, faster. There was a part of him that ached to crush something, that hungered for destruction. There was a need he hadn't felt in weeks that seemed like years, or a memory of a need, as strong as if he were feeling it anew. There was an image in his head of what he could do, of sweeping the sturdy practice blade hard at the side of his target's head, hitting the tender spot above the ear. Of bringing her down, of bringing his weapon down on her, again and again, with bone-breaking precision. He wouldn't. Of course he wouldn't, but he could. He was capable of it. It would even be easy.

He could see Rey, not as she stood now, facing him, but as she would look when he was done with her—when Snoke was done with her—bloody and lifeless on the ground.

He slammed his mind back against the image and crushed it, ground it against the inner wall of his skull and ground out all sense of the world with it, smothered his traitorous mind in darkness.

.

"Ben."  
He sucked in a gasp and opened his eyes, blinking, frantic, to find his field of vision filled with Rey, living and mostly undamaged. She was above him somehow, framed by the glaring white sky.

"Are you okay?"

His head hurt and his mouth wouldn't work. He tried to answer her with his eyes. He didn't dare open his mind.

Rey put a hand on his face, swept his hair back from his brow. "You collapsed."

He nodded vaguely. He was figuring that part out.

"Do you know what happened?"

His breathing was heavy. He couldn't remember how much he had exerted himself at the end. Belatedly, he registered her question and sat up, too fast. Rey had to rear back or risk a collision of foreheads. He didn't know yet how to explain what had happened, but he knew one word that would make her understand. "Snoke."

That earned an appropriate flash of fear before she fought it down, setting her stubborn jaw and applying herself to the problem. "What about him? A memory? What?"

Ben squeezed his eyes shut and nodded again, hunching his shoulders. It must have been a memory. It had to have been. Snoke was destroyed, body and soul. He had been sure of that.

Rey scooted closer, putting herself hip to hip and wrapping her arms around him. She moved slow, offering him a chance to retreat. When he didn't, she pulled his head to her shoulder and pressed her cheek to his sweat-damp hair. She held him as she had done in the hut, after his mother's letter. She held him as tightly as if she meant to contain whatever horror was inside him, and he was willing, for the moment, to let her try.


	8. And One Lone Candle

A bad memory, and only that. This was what Luke assured him after both he and Rey had poked around in Ben's head until they were satisfied. A candleflame of humiliation burned hot at the knowledge that he had attacked himself, rendered himself unconscious with the Force over a mere memory. A flashback. Worse, it frightened him to know that he had been able to manifest the phantom of that same, insidious, single-minded bloodlust with which the Supreme Leader had driven him.

Rey, of course, refused to hear his suggestions that she keep her guard up, or keep her distance. She trusted him and she saw the incident only as another reason why she should. He didn't have the energy to argue with her. Not then. Not when she slipped her arm around his and and led him away with advice from Luke to take the remainder of the day for themselves. Not when she fetched a blanket from their hut and took it and him out to the Falcon's field, nor when she spread the blanket on the softest patch of dew-flecked grass and pulled him down with her. Not when, at her persistent direction and insistence that he was helping her meditate, he stretched out on his back and pillowed his head in her lap.

It was still overwhelming, the physical affection she lavished on him. There had been a measure of it before, when she would lead him by the hand or sit close to him, casually brushing shoulders or knees, but it was clear now that she had been restraining herself.

Ben was not oblivious to his own touch-starvation. He had cultivated it under Snoke's care. He had thought to make himself less human, to exist as an incarnation of the Dark Side, enlightened and above physical needs. Neither was he oblivious to that same starvation in Rey, subjected by the simpler means of abandonment. Rey, however, had her friends. She had Finn and Luke and the others. She had been liberal with her affections long before she had warmed up to Ben. She had, therefore, at least to some degree, known what to expect.

To Ben, it was all still achingly new, addictive in its novelty. The touch of her fingers still left him spinning, light-headed. She stroked his hair for a while, idly, and then she grew still, slowed her breathing, and went deep inside herself. He could feel it through the unlocked door between their minds. While he reclined at her mercy, she shaped a ball of her own inner Light, casting it like an aura around the two of them and holding it there—just holding it—exercising her stability and her concentration. It sat invisible and heavy, seeping warmth into the cracks and the cold places, lulling him into a sleepy daze.

He didn't know how long they stayed that way. It could have been days.

He roused to Rey's hand on his cheek, fingers tracing the lines of the scar again. When he opened his eyes, she stopped. Ben sat up and turned to look at her, having to pause and steady himself as a strange sense of buoyancy afflicted him. He felt, for a moment, as if he would float away, as if he were made of the same air-light vapor as Ahch-To's abundant clouds. When the feeling passed, he kissed her, because she was there in front of him, wanting to be kissed, and because he was afraid he might forget the feel of her if he went too long without it.

And yet, as the lingering glow of her Light slipped away, the doubts crept back in. "You should hate me."

"Why?"

"You know why."

She had smiled at first, with amused patience. Now she just looked unimpressed. "Haven't we been over this enough?"

"Can it ever be enough?"

"Yes. I think so."

Her optimism only fed his worry. "I could hurt you."

She shook her head. "You won't." There was no hesitation in the reply, and no doubt.

"What if I do?"

"I can handle myself."

"I can't."

She tilted her head to catch his gaze, holding him there as surely as if the look were a physical touch. "I think you can."

"Rey..."

"Ben, stop it." Now she did touch him, and when he jerked his head away, she pursued. "You didn't lose control today. You protected me. You can see that, right?"

Luke had said something similar after the event, while he and Rey were probing his mind, but Ben was not convinced. It had not felt like he was protecting anyone. "I would have done anything for Snoke,” he murmured. If he lost control again, if he forgot where he was, he still might.

"No you wouldn't. You wouldn't kill me, even when he told you to. I'm not going to be scared by a memory."  
He had backed himself into a corner with that one. She was right, but nevertheless, he couldn't shake off his unease. Whatever inner peace she had shared with him had failed to set in, washed away with the foolish, dream-dazed hopes of that morning. He stood abruptly and looked away from her, squinting at the empty horizon, imbuing himself with its cold and distance. Rey climbed to her feet beside him, but when she tried again to touch him again, he shrugged her off. "I can't do this, Rey."

"Do what?" There were sparks in her voice, the start of a fire.

"I can't..." He grimaced. He put a hand to his face. He remembered his bloodlust in the arena. "I can’t let you..."

"Let me what? Be close to you?" She was radiating frustration now. He could see the shape of her thoughts in silhouette, if not in detail, and what she kept from him was easy enough to guess. He had let her in only to push her away, and Rey did not suffer abandonment well.

It didn't matter. He had been wrong. He had been so wrong to think that she would be safe with him, to think that either of them dropping their guard around the other was a good idea. He knew also that he could not explain this to her in a way she would accept—not with words, and not without them. A dropping of barriers, a psychic exchange of emotion and intent would not be enough. Honesty would not make a difference. A person could be honest and wrong.

Rey reached for him nonetheless, grasped him by the shoulders and turned him, made him look at her. He raised both hands up and outward, breaking her hold. He steeled himself with a breath. He stepped back. When her hand moved again, he stopped it with the Force.

In that, he had made his message clear, and he had gone too far.

In Rey's disbelieving anger and in Ben's remorse, the impasse built itself in the arm's length of empty space between them. The precious light he had coveted went cold, filtered by the blanket of his fears. A winter sun that tempts, but holds its heat too far away to be felt through the biting wind.

It was Rey who gave in first, relinquishing her stand with a huff and bending to pluck the dew-damp blanket off the ground. "I need to work on the Falcon." A well-planned escape. Ben avoided the ship as much as possible on a good day. She was giving herself an excuse to walk away without conceding the argument.

As quickly as that, he was back to where he had been the night before. She was leaving him behind, but he had done the same to her already, with words and resistance in place of action. It nauseated him to think that only a few hours had passed since that first morning’s kiss, and not the days or weeks it had seemed. A few hours. He might as well have slept through them and spared them both the trouble.

He had seen the pain in her eyes before her shields slammed down and she turned away.

It was better this way. It had been, he told himself, a fleeting spell of poor judgment, brought on by high emotion and stress. He would need to be stronger. Rey would need him to be stronger. This was what he told himself, over and over. It sounded logical as long as he ignored the despairing clamor of his heart.

It was better this way, and yet this was worse than where he had been before. It was worse for having tasted that closeness, for knowing what it felt like to hold her, and for imagining, if only for a few hours, that his life could be so bright. Trying to rebuild his defenses would be harder for having surrendered once—for knowing that, mere moments ago, he had kissed her, and he could do it again as easily as catching up to her now. She would have him back in an instant, and that was the cruelty of it. He could not indulge in intimacies and keep her safe at the same time. He had been selfish and foolhardy to try.

These were the words that spun on the wheel of his mind until he was walking the path again, shadowed on either side by crumbling hovels, and tailed by an unusually quiet Brell. He passed his own whimsically designated hut and kept going. That familiarity would not afford him the kind of shelter he needed. He had half a mind to choose some random, empty ruin and hide there for a time, but the image in his head was dusty and distasteful. He kept going, past the outskirts of the village, staying on the path, and came at last to a great slab of stone that hung over the sea. He remembered this as the place where Rey had left the Falcon on her first visit to Ahch-To. He had seen it there when he came after her. The field higher up had been a choice made later, meant to avoid the long climb.

The sea was inordinately calm that day. He felt it should have been restless and uneven to match his state of mind. Even the scent of it seemed subtle without the usual strong wind to carry it over the island. He could smell instead the grass and the acerbic scent of the trees. He narrowed his focus, grounding his senses and thoughts in the physical. He breathed in the crisp air and exhaled his nervous tension, sweeping out the mess that was his mind. The endeavor was more successful than he had expected it to be. It should not have been as easy as it was to distance himself from the confused turmoil in the field, nor from the thread that still bound him to Rey. He sat down to take advantage of what clarity he could hold onto, closing his eyes and casting himself out on wings of thought over the mountainous island, propelled by his mind's need to escape. He kept to the wilder slopes and ravines, wary of touching Rey's mind by accident. He did not let himself drift. He soared with intent from point to point, chasing the strongest eddies in the Force. He realized after a while that what he was looking for was his grandfather, or some other entity of the same ilk. He knew there were others present. He knew that Luke also spoke to his grandfather's mentor, the war hero Obi-wan Kenobi, Ben's namesake.

He found neither, but noted several places where the Force was abnormally active, set to some purpose he could not decipher. He expanded his search to the other islands, following the roads Luke had shown him. Then he went farther still, diving into the depths of the too-still sea, passing the life signatures of fish and greater beasts, cold and predatory and lurking. There was nothing man-made beneath the surface—not a sunken ship nor a flooded temple. Even the Force was untamed, unlike the careful channels of the island, flowing with the tides and the vagabond sholes of fish. Deeper and deeper he forged, and deeper still, to where the sunlight was smothered by the weight of the sea. To where the fish saw by lights of their own creation, or else found their way by other senses entirely. To where there was only the touch of the current and of the Force, and all the distant voices of a spherical ocean. To depths on the edge of unbeing. To the birthcradle of life.

When he returned to his body, the sun was gone, casting only a feeble gray dusk from below the horizon. He had been back only moments when he heard Rey's voice in his head. She must have been waiting for him, aware of his wandering.

_Ben, I want to talk._

The calm and the wisdom of the sea left him. He did not trust himself to answer, and certainly not to face her in person. He redoubled his walls, he blocked out her voice. He tied another knot in the thread between them. He needed to stay away from her, in body and in mind, until he was sure of his choice. Until he could put on the proverbial mask again and keep her at a safe distance, far away from his sharp edges.

He would not go to dinner. He would stay out as late as he could stand, which perhaps would be all night. He knew he could not avoid Rey indefinitely. He would be childish to try, but a night apart, at least, would help to solidify the boundaries between them.

Classen accommodated part of this plan when he came to trade places with Brell, bringing her meal and Ben's as well.

"Did Rey send this?" He couldn't resist asking.

"Yeah," said Classen. "What the hell, man? I thought you two had worked it out."

Brell rolled her eyes. "Remember who you're talking to. He has a reputation for making things hard on himself. That's why we're here."

Her defense was far from welcome, but he could not very well refute it. He let the answer stand and turned his back on the guards, picking at the meal with little interest.

Eventually Brell left and took their dishes with her. Ben stayed on the cliff under Classen's disapproving frown until the last of the dusk had faded and the nightly procession of the stars was well on its way. He had been waiting for Rey to fall asleep so that he might slip in and do the same without having to look her in the eye. He realized much later than he should have that she was not meaning to return to his hut at all. She was back aboard the Falcon, not yet asleep, but nearly so.

Feeling foolish and more than a little dejected, he went back up the path and to his empty bed. He entertained little hope of sleeping, but after a dreary wait in the darkness and a few imaginary boulders piled on top of his restless wants and worries, he did.

He was snapped awake perhaps two hours later by a sudden, immersive vision of Rey on one of the Falcon's cots, bolting out of her own sleep on the tail of a nightmare. He saw her in his mind as she was in that moment, staring into the dark and trying to catch her breath. He watched her as, quietly, wearily, she began to cry.

This too was his fault.

Unable to leave her in such a state without at least an acknowledgment, he sent a brush of mental fingers, a touch of sympathy and inquiry. Her response was to gather up her thoughts and present him with a clear and vivid picture of her desire to be held in his arms. Like a vengeful fist, the feeling reached between his ribs and twisted his heart. He shut her out.

There was no more sleeping that night for either of them.

.

In the morning, when light began to creep into his hut, he felt better. Somewhat to his surprise, the calm of his seaside meditation had returned, and with it a sense of resolve. He could do this. It would hurt, but he could do it. He could wear the mask. He could even work with Rey, be close to her, as long as he kept himself contained. It had been like that with Snoke at the beginning, and at the end. He had done his job without letting his doubts and counterproductive desires interfere—until, of course, they had.

That was beside the point.

He could be stronger now. He could take what he had learned and refine it. If he set his mind on a goal other than Rey, for Rey's sake, he could do this.

He loitered outside the cooking hut where Luke was already at work on the morning meal. He would talk to Rey when she came. Their dalliance of the day before had been an act of giddy foolishness, just as the kiss at Snoke's fall had been. They had forgotten themselves. It should not have happened at all, but at least it had not lasted long. She would not like to hear it, but she would understand. She was wise.

And he was used to making mistakes. To making them and carrying on, even when they left him in pieces.

He had memorized these lies and nearly convinced himself of them when breakfast was over and Rey had still not appeared.

"She ate with Chewie," Luke said, unprompted. He was not looking at Ben, but could, apparently, still read his nephew like a datapad.

It was a simple, trivial change in routine, but it was enough to make his resolve waver. He had to steady himself, sway with the blow and adapt to it. Somewhere in the span of the night, not confronting Rey had become worse than the alternative. He was in a state of limbo, unsure if he would be able to hold up his walls. Already they were trying to shake themselves apart. He feared that if he did not test them soon, he would sabotage himself without ever having seen her. He needed to be thrown into the fire, to be tempered, or he would crumble, brittle, under the pressure of his own doubts.

But he could not force the encounter—not if she was trying to avoid him. He quelled the flare of frustration and reminded himself that this was his own fault. Shame was a bitter calming agent, but it worked. If she needed time alone, then he would wait. He would distract himself. He was in no mood for another whimsical Force-flight and he was bending under the strain of trying to bury his emotions, but he could do the opposite. He could chase another storm. He had no shortage of torments and trauma that needed to be confronted and dealt with. He would drown out the pain of the present with an agony of the past.

On that unpleasant line of thinking, he left Luke and went back to his own hut. The lockbox was there, tucked beside the larger storage crate. He pulled it out and opened it, riding a sullen sense of anticipation. The letter drew his eye, tempting in its promise of cathartic misery, but he remembered it too well. There was no need to look again. He went instead to the album, having left it untouched the day before. It was an eccentric little novelty item, designed like a book with holo projectors built into each page, able to hold still images or short videos. It had been a gift from one of his mother's council friends. Ben had been six or seven. He remembered sitting at a table, helping his mother pick out which holos to start the album with.

They were generic family pictures, for the most part, immortalizing trips and holidays and perfectly ordinary, everyday moments. There was one of a small Ben watching with a look of rapt attention while his father pointed at the back of the Falcon, no doubt labeling bits and explaining the workings of the ship. There was one of his mother in an elegant gown with a patient, insincere smile on her face, likely preparing for some political encounter she was not looking forward to. There was one of Ben in his bedroom, holding the same model ship that lay in the box before him, a scratched and faded contrast to the new and bright object in the holo. It was a match to the altered state of its owner, he thought, and he appreciated the symbolism, in a masochistic sort of way.

The page after that contained a video. It was a short clip of a lanky, growing Ben riding wild and raucous on his 'uncle' Chewie's shoulders. The tinny, quiet audio had captured his embarrassing attempt at a wookiee roar. The page opposite was another video, this time depicting his uncle Luke demonstrating lightsaber forms.

So continued the visual chronology of his childhood until it stopped half way through the album, early in his twelfth year. That was when he had gone to train with Luke officially. He had seen his mother in person perhaps twice between that day and the one on which he had betrayed them all.

He needed to talk to her.

He needed to call her, and thanks to his rash actions in Rey's absence, he would need to use the Falcon's comm to do it. It was an excuse to see Rey if she was still sulking aboard the ship, and a purpose outside of the tangled mess that lay between them. In some unwanted twist of irony, his mistakes with Rey had readied him to face his mother.

Shortly, he was standing outside the Falcon, and Rey was aboard. He summoned her out with a thought.

He could feel Rey's inquisitive touch in response, but only that. Her mood and intent were guarded. He was left to wonder if she would show herself at all until she did, and the look on her face was not blank as her touch had been, but hard-eyed and lined with a tightness that threatened to become a frown.

Ben's mental walls aligned themselves with his ribcage, holding the thunder of his heart in check. "I want to call my mother."

Her brow furrowed. Her tone, when she deigned to speak, was short and sharp and cold. "Great. Fine. Why do you need me?"

"I..." By some wonder, he didn't wince. "I broke the communicator. I want to use the Falcon's."

"Oh..." Something clicked into place. He could hear it in her voice as the ice melted and fell away. " _Oh._ I've got something better." She turned on her heel, leaving him to determine whether or not she was inviting him in. He decided on boldness and followed, stopping again at the top of the ramp because she had turned aside, still in the main hold, and was unfastening the lid of a storage crate. From this, she retrieved a long-distance holo comm of the same make and model as the one he had smashed.

"Leia said you might need a new one," she explained. "I wondered why."

Ben wondered how Leia had known. Had she been aware of what was happening in the split-second end of that call, or had she intuited it? Had Luke told her? He was not aware of the two being able to hold detailed conversations over such a distance without technological aid, but he would not have put it past them.

Rey handed the comm to him, taking care not to let their hands meet, and then, as he carried it back down the ramp and headed across the field, she followed.

He still was unable to read her, except by the sullen, quiet anger on her face, and he had no idea what he could say to make that go away. He set up the comm on the rough-hewn dining table while Rey lurked behind him and Classen loitered in the doorway. Before he could lose his nerve, he entered the code to Leia's private line.

An assistant answered—one he did not recognize. She looked at him and then over his shoulder at Rey, and asked them to wait.

And wait, and wait in awkward, weighted silence.

When Leia sat down, she was already talking, her eyes not on the hollow but on a datapad in her hand. "Sorry about that. The usual. It..." The words trailed off when she looked up, and her face flickered through an array of emotion before she reined it in and found her voice again. "Ben."

Ben caught himself studying the cold blue projection of her face. He was frozen by the immediacy of the moment. This was real. It was happening. It was a step he could not go back from. Not unless he wanted to smash another communicator, at the least. "Mother."

Leia opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t, as lost for words as he was. At last, with delicacy, she smiled, and fell back on a politician's manners. "Thank you for calling."

He was only grateful that she hadn't asked if he was alright. "I read your letter."

"Oh." Her eyes might have been a little watery, but it was hard to tell over the sketchy holo. "Good. I'm glad it reached you safely."

"Mother..." He was gathering himself, bracing for the impact his own words would have on both of them, but she beat him to it.

"Don't… Don’t tell me you're sorry. I don't want to hear it. I don't need to. Just..." She stopped. She remembered to breathe. "Thank you. For calling."

Ben dropped his gaze. He wished that she were there in person so that he could feel her presence, sense her mood, and from it, know how to proceed. "I want to see you." He hadn't known he was going to say it until he had, and then he was not entirely sure it was true, but the words were in the air and it would only do more harm to take them back.

"I'll come." Like him, she seemed to speak without stopping to think, or she simply had no need to. There was not a speck of doubt in her eyes. "As soon as I can, son. Give me a few days. Maybe less." She tried again to smile. "Luke has been pestering me to visit that island of his anyway. He keeps saying I need a vacation." She was talking now as a defense, to make a heavy moment lighter. Ben had seen her do this before, many times. It had been a pet peeve of his when he was a boy, and he suffered a bout of nostalgia for the trivial, unimportant bother of it.

"Thank you." He said it too fast, leaving no space between the words, and then he shut off the comm. It was as much as he could take. Already his mental walls were groaning, buckling, splintering under the pressure of a new storm. He would see his mother in a few days. He would have to speak to her properly. He would apologize, whether she wanted him to or not. He had doomed himself to that. He only hoped he would have the strength to look at her.

"I'm glad you did that." This came from Rey. A concession, subdued. "She needed to hear it."

Ben didn't answer. His control was too fragile to risk speaking again, most of all to her. He didn't know what might slip out.

When he was silent long enough, Rey left. Her brooding anger still oozed off her in waves, but there was a feeling of resignation with it, and of patience. She was still hopeful, Ben sensed. She didn't think the distance between them would last, and he didn't have the energy to argue with her, nor to blame her for harboring doubt.

.

In the end, she was right. He lasted the rest of the day, mostly by keeping to himself, but then the night came, and the strain of his past and present caught up with him. His mother was coming, and he had pushed away the one person he could lean on.

It was a waking dream that caught him, an imagining made too real by the nighttime shadows and his sleep-starved brain. It was a jumble of half-finished and too-vivid thoughts, Snoke and his mother and Rey on parade behind his bloodshot, stinging eyes. It was the tightness in his chest and the painful twist of his gut, and it was the onslaught of all these things hour after hour under a star-flecked sky. The plea, when it came, was unbidden, bursting from a half-dreaming mind and fueled by a consuming sense of desperation. What was left of his sanity could only watch and sigh, defeated, pressed into a corner by a storm-wind of need.

_Rey, please..._

He would regret this in the morning. He wasn't capable of it now. He would tear himself apart if he had to go another minute alone.

She did not make him wait that long. She was there in a matter of seconds, standing like a vision in the lantern light with her hair wild around her shoulders. At first he thought his frantic will had transported her somehow, by some means of the Force he could only tap when he was too mad and broken to think about it. Only after moments of staring, of slowing his breath by the weight of her presence, was he able to think backwards in a straight line and realize that she had been close all along, just across the path in Luke's hut.

He reached for her, his hand, his arm moving without conscious thought, acting as a manifestation of his need. Rey came forward, came down into his arms, and his heart swelled to press against its bone-barred prison until it could scarcely beat.

"I'm sorry."

"Shut up."

He was rattled and exhausted and could not keep track of what happened next, or what, if anything, was said, but soon he was lying on his beggar's pile of blankets, and by some blessing of the universe, she was with him.


	9. If You Bend For Me

Morning light shot like a blaster bolt through the open doorway, having found just the right hole in the clouds to stab at Ben's face. It was an act of unusual violence for Ahch-To's sleepy sun, and his first irrational thought was that he was being punished with annoyances.

Then the sleep-fog cleared, making way for remembrance, and with that, a sense of helplessness. He could not let Rey go. He could not push her away, not even for her own protection. He was weak. That was what it came down to again and again. He was a slave to his emotions and in that, nothing had changed.

He had known it from the start. Pushing her away the first time had failed. Why should the second time have been any different? He felt abruptly miserable for Rey's sake, who had come out of a life of abandonment only to be taunted by it again. She trusted him against all odds, and he had repaid that by throwing her away and telling her it was for her own good. When she’d called to him in her nightmare-fueled sorrow, he had refused her, and yet…

And yet when the roles reversed, she hadn’t punished him. She hadn’t made him wait. In spite of it all, she was here, warm and languid in his arms, rousing slowly. He breathed around the lump in his throat and squeezed her tight, earning a small, sleepy noise as she adjusted to his clinging and pressed her face into his shirt.

He let the moment last a while longer before he spoke. "I'm sorry."

She didn't move, but she was awake enough to answer. "You said that."

"I was trying to protect you."

She sighed. She pulled herself from his arms, sitting up to look down at him. One of her hands stayed where it was on his chest, idly smoothing out his slept-in shirt. "I can protect myself, Ben. Why don't you trust me?"

"I do."

"But not enough to think I can protect myself."

"I'm sorry."

"Stop saying that." She swooped down and kissed him, catching him off guard, and then, a little late, she asked, "is this okay?"

Ben had no hope of holding onto the delusion that he wanted otherwise. He sat up, following where she retreated. He cupped her face in his hands. He studied the dune sea of her eyes, imagined she had stolen their color from the desert sand at dusk. He stroked her cheek and wondered if the freckles there were constellations. He kissed her on the forehead, and then on the lips. Her mouth, surely, was a door to the Light itself.

"I'm sorry too," she said, minutes later.

The apology puzzled him. "You did nothing wrong."

"I think... I moved too fast. I pushed you." She said the words with precision. He wondered how long she had been thinking about it. "I was trying to make up for lost time."

The sentiment earned a chuckle. "I'm an exile on a deserted island. All I have is time, and you."

But Rey had turned her head at the start of that statement and was looking at him oddly, ignoring the words in favor of something else. "Did you just laugh?"

"No," he said. "Yes. Why?"

"I've never heard you laugh before."

"Yes, you have." Of course she had. There had been a moment in his cell, maybe, or before, when they'd fought Snoke. He couldn't place it, but he knew he had laughed in her presence. He was sure of it.

On the other hand… his laughter did not always manifest itself wholly. It was possible, he conceded, that in that moment he could not quite remember, he had only thought about laughing, or made a sound that was not quite definable as such...

"Nope." Whatever the truth of it, Rey was sure of herself, so he took her word for it.

"I'll make sure you hear me next time, then."

She smiled and said nothing to that. Ben didn't object to the silence. There was a lock of hair fallen askew across her forehead, wafting gently in the draft from the window. He couldn't take his eyes off it. With a carefully composed thought and the aid of the Force, he lifted the lid of the storage crate and floated Rey's hairbrush to his hand. "May I?"

She bit her lip on a smile and nodded, scooting herself around to put her back to him. He nearly laughed again at the unlikely arrangement of her hair, strung up in loops and ridiculous knots by their night-long cuddling. It was, at least, something he knew how to fix.

She braced herself at first, clearly expecting the experience to hurt, but she was underestimating him. Ben took extra care to be gentle and smiled to himself when she relaxed. The tangles came out easily enough, with patience. The worst he separated with his fingers. Then, because she was enjoying it so much, he caught up the layers of hair from above her ears and drew them to meet at the back of her skull, binding them in a thin braid.

He could sense the way her brow furrowed, He didn’t need to see her face. "Are you braiding my hair?"

"Yes."

"Where did you learn to do that?"

"Take a guess." He pinched the end of the braid and looked for something to tie it off with. Rey had a set of ties she used for her buns, but they were in a bag tucked deep inside the storage crate. He wasn't sure he could lift them out with the Force and not make a mess. He settled instead for breaking off a loose thread from the edge of one of his blankets, pretending he didn't feel guilty about this tiny act of destruction.

"Leia?"

"Mmhm." With the braid secured, he lifted the whole cascade of Rey's hair and let it slide over his palms, for no purpose other than pleasure. Rey didn't mind. She looked as if she'd gone boneless under his touch, head tilted back and eyes closed blissfully. He kissed the lobe of her ear and stood up. "Do you think they made any bets on us this time?"

She snorting at that, craning around to look at him and, with some reluctance, clambering to her feet. "We could bet on it. Whether they did or not."

"I don't have any money," he reminded her.

"If I win, you braid my hair again."

"I like braiding your hair. That's not a loss."

"Good, then we both win. What about you?"

He considered it. "If I win, you teach me that recipe you learned from Finn."

"You want to make pancakes?"

"I want to make pancakes."

Rey was struggling not to grin. "Okay. Deal. What's your bet?"

"I bet that Luke and the guards made bets on us."

"Okay.” She gave a single, sharp nod. "I bet we annoyed them too much and they didn't."

“Deal.” He sealed the bet with another kiss on her far too kissable forehead.

A small moment passed in which all they did was stand that way, as sculptures stand, Ben's lips on her brow and Rey's hand over his heart. Then her eyes unfocused and she said, "Luke's not up yet. Wait here. There's something I've been meaning to do."

While Ben stood obediently where he was, she ducked out of the hut. Bets aside, Ben wondered which guard was on duty and what their thoughts would be on Rey's coming and going. It shouldn't have mattered. They were there to keep him from killing himself or from violating the terms of his exile. That was all. He was fairly certain that matchmaking was not in the job description, regardless of the fact that his mother had been the one to pick them out. Nevertheless, he wondered.

Rey came back with a broom. Moving too quickly for Ben to predict her intent, she rolled up both of their pallets and stacked them on top of the storage crate, then went about vigorously sweeping the floor. It seemed a ridiculous concept to him—sweeping dirt off of more dirt—but under her precise and forceful hand, the loose dust worn up by activity came away to reveal hard, smooth-packed earth. She went over the length and breadth of the hut this way, shrugging away his uncertain offer to help. As soon as the dust was cleared, she darted out of sight again, leaving Ben frowning at the quandary of what to expect from her next.

When she returned a second time, she had traded the broom for more blankets and a basket full of what looked like chips of driftwood. The basket she set aside. The blankets she separated, handing one to Ben with the instruction to "hold that."

The one she kept for herself was half the size of the other, and blue. She took it and the basket to the window, knelt on top of the storage crate, and began using the chips—which must have been sturdier than they looked—to pin the cloth to the wall. It was a moment of enlightenment to realize that the stones around the window had been carved and arranged for this exact purpose, or near enough.

When Ben had watched her work a few of the wooden pins in, he came to help without asking, and soon they had an effective curtain hung over the window. Rey bunched it up and tied it to one side with a piece of rope from her basket, then she retrieved the second, larger blanket and started the process over again at the doorway. She did not speak, even as Ben worked beside her. He thought of the old AT-AT he had seen in her memories and he wondered how many long hours she had spent alone, in utter silence, trying to turn desolation into a comfortable home.

With the curtains hung, it was considerably darker. Even at night, they had been able to see by the indirect glow of the guard’s lantern through the open door. "We'll need a light."

Rey thought for a moment, and then whisked through the blanketed doorway, leaving the channel between them so wide that he could still feel her brisk footsteps when she was out of hearing range. He could close his eyes and see the path in front of her, and then the storage hut, as clear as she was seeing it herself. He could watch her hands sifting through the crates until she found a supply of extra lanterns. Then she was on her way back.

He wondered at the strength of their connection.

Force bonds were legendary, but legend would have a person believe that they were rare. Ben had studied the Jedi histories and the Sith, and then he had sought records outside of both teachings. A Force bond of the legendary sort lay on the same spectrum as the bonds that formed between student and teacher, or between family members. These bonds were not so rare at all. The defining nature of the Force was, after all, that it connected all life in the universe. There was only one difference between his bond with Rey and his bond with Luke, or even his bond with a non-sensitive being like Classen or Brell. That difference was the conductivity of the connection. Force bonds existed between all living things. The smallest trickled like a thread-thin stream over uneven ground, while the greatest flowed like a mile-wide river.

A bond could be cultivated or it could deteriorate. There were methods of blocking such bonds intentionally, but they were not always successful. It was easier to strengthen a Force bond than it was to unravel it, as it was easier to clear a clogged river than it was to dam it up. It was in the Force's nature to reconnect with itself.

The bond between him and Rey had been opened wide when she fought back on Starkiller Base, when he tried to take from her and she had turned the tables, reversed the roles, and taken from him. In that first touch, she had seen the workings of the Force inside him and had taught herself by feel and instinct, coming into her own with such cunning and power that she had bested him within the day.

Their bond had formed in a moment of contention and enmity, of fear and even hate, but it had run the gamut from there to fascination and sympathy, to reluctant and then eager trust, and finally to something that he could only label as love, though he was afraid to say the word aloud.

If the bond still growing between them was of a measure to match the Force bonds of legend, it would come as no surprise to him. It would, as far as he was concerned, be only right, for surely their meeting was on a scale with the legends of old.

Rey came back with the lantern, set it near the wall across from where they slept, and the homey yellow glow brought the domed chamber to life. She smiled at him, cheeky and victorious, and he answered it with a heartfelt grin.

They washed the bedding next, because it seemed a shame to lay it used and musty on a freshly swept floor. While it dried in the open air, they went to see what Luke had left them for breakfast. He and the guards had eaten while the two were off in their own busy world—this Brell informed them—but there was a creamy oat mash still warm over the fire. They were both a bit chilled from working with the cold well water, and Rey took smug pleasure in the excuse to huddle close at his side while they ate.

There was a spell cast in the simple wholeness of the moment—of Rey close to him, soft and pliant and satisfied. Of the comfortable heat of the food in his belly in contrast to the chill of the island air. There was a sense of laziness and contentment that was completely new to Ben, and dangerous in its allure. He wondered for the first time if every morning could be as nice.

But Rey was not the type to settle only partway to a goal.

"We're going to have to work on the sparring thing again."

"I know." He had been trying not to think about it, but in trying not to, he had.

"How do you want to do it?"

Ben sighed and set his bowl down, suddenly losing the taste for it. At least he had been nearly finished. "I don't want to hurt you."

"I can handle a few bruises... and pay them back, if I have to."

He resisted the urge to rub at the scar on his face. He didn't answer. She heard his protest anyway.

"You're not going to go berserk and kill me. Even if you did, I can defend myself. I'll give you a new scar to match the old one and we'll pick up the pieces from there." She was grinning. He felt appalled that she could say any of that with a sense of humor. She picked up on his unease and sobered, but continued. "We need to start somewhere. Can we just... go easy and see what happens?"

"Alright."

"You're okay with that?"

"No."

"Ben..."

"I don't know what else to do."

She put her chin on his shoulder like she was trying to be cute. He could feel her breath on his ear, stirring a curl of hair. "How about trusting me?"

"I said alright." She was pouting now. He could see it from the corner of his eye. He turned his head until his lips touched her brow, and the next words passed from his mind to hers, forgoing the clumsiness of verbal speech. _I trust you, or I wouldn't try._

.

With all that said, they did not use the practice swords that day. They spent a long time meditating instead, on the sands of the training ring. As if in some kind of test, or to reassure herself, Rey practiced again the balancing exercise she had demonstrated before their argument, expanding the ball of energy in time with her breathing. This time, in an instructor's tone adopted from Luke, she asked Ben to help, directing him to take up and hold half of the invisible globe. The act involved weaving his own energies into it, as one would curl fingers around an upheld object. He was doubtful, concerned that he would taint her Light-born energy, or at the very least destabilize it, but she held up the slack until his grip was firm, and the conjuring remained steady.

Luke came and sat down not long after they started, having likely sensed their activity. Ben registered his presence and proceeded to ignore him. The stillness of the exercise was soothing and he wanted it to last.

It did, and longer than he expected, but that was thanks to Rey. In the end, it was she who brought the exercise to a close, releasing the energy evenly, pushing it outward, letting it thin and dissipate as Ben followed her example. She came out of her meditation looking pleasantly relaxed, while Ben could only breathe a sigh of relief that he had not, this time, messed anything up.

He was forgiven, again and undeservedly, but Rey was wary with her affections. He caught her watching him uneasily whenever he left her side, and yet she would hesitate and make eye-contact before she touched him. There was no ignoring what he had done to her, nor pretending that it hadn't happened. He could feel it across the bond, a new tension that sat in the space below her heart. He had made her fear him again, in a different sort of way.

The rest of the island's human inhabitants seemed unanimously pleased with the renewed symbiosis between the two, if somewhat put off by the dramatic interlude. Ben continued his practice of ignoring the guards and extending little more than guilty silence to his uncle.

It should not have come as a surprise when Rey was the one to disrupt their sleep with another nightmare. He was well aware that she slept as poorly as he did sometimes. It was one of the first things he had known about her.

It should not have, and yet when he woke to her gasping and twitching in her blankets, forehead beaded with cold sweat, it shook him to the core.

He roused her with her name and a touch on her shoulder, and for a fraction of a second, the aggressive Force energy she had been gathering in her sleep was aimed at him. Then she came awake fully and dismissed it like dust on the wind, lunging up out of the blankets to throw her arms around him.

She was shaking, not all over and not continuously, but in tiny, wave-like tremors that ran the length of her spine. "It was Jakku." The words came thin and broken. "I was waiting on Jakku, and they were never coming. Nobody was coming." She sucked in a ragged gasp and tried to steady herself. There were points of wetness on his shoulder where she was hiding her face. He squeezed her tighter, not knowing what else to do, until the shaking stilled and she composed herself enough to sit up. "Sorry." It was a hoarse mumble, but free of the panic that had strained her voice before. "I didn't mean to cry on you."

"Rey," he said, pushing a net of hair away from her face and catching her eyes. He twitched a corner of his mouth into a half-smile, wanting to reassure her. "You can cry on me whenever you want."

To his utmost relief, she smiled back. "Okay."

.

He braided her hair again in the morning. He had lost that bet, which was no loss at all, and it made for a fair excuse to pamper her a little.

Later, he agreed to spar again.

Rey was careful, too much so to give him any real challenge. It was a child's game, a slow circling, a brief, half-hearted engagement, a repetition of this pattern, and then another. Blade met only blade. There was no winner, and in Ahch-To's breeze, neither of them broke a sweat. Rey decided when it was over, stepping back and holding her weapon down at her side. Ben mirrored her. His mind had not once strayed from the present, but he felt wary. It didn't seem enough.

"You alright?"

"Yes." He wasn't sure if it was true.

Rey came forward and kissed him, a smile tugging at her lips. "Feel better?"

His hands found their way to her hair, tucking a few loose strands behind her ears. "It doesn't prove anything. It wasn't like before."

"We'll work on it. Just a little at a time, okay?"

"Well, I did agree to trust you."

"Trust me," she echoed, and kissed him again. She was doing that at every opportunity. "Do you think you'll be ready to show Leia when she comes?"

"Show her what? Sparring?" He let her hear his nervousness at the prospect, though she would have felt it without the aid of an outward sign.

She nodded. "Mhm. What we did just now. Nothing big."

"I'll think about it."

"Okay." She left it at that, and she left him at the edge of the sparring ring while she went back to run through forms. Ben sat and watched, trying to make himself study her style, to come up with something useful to say. He couldn't keep his focus, though. It was too easy to lose himself in the way she moved.

Rey was not overly graceful nor fluid when she fought. She was hard and swift like a falling stone. She had been strong when he met her, and she was stronger now. There was little to critique her on, even when he did pay enough attention to take notes. She had broken the habit of wielding a single-bladed weapon like staff, except in rare moments of thoughtlessness, and those were getting rarer. Her lightsaber, on the other hand, had been designed with her prior skills in mind, with its extended hilt and twin blades providing her with something closer to what she had grown up with.

He considered asking if they could practice blade to staff. He had fought against her once while she held the yellow-tipped saber, but that duel had been interrupted. Neither of them had been left bleeding on the ground by the end of it, and the next time they fought, it had been side by side. A reminder of that brief encounter would not plague him, he hoped, in the way that visions of snow and a dying sun did.

He would suggest the idea to Rey, but later. For the time being, he was content to watch.

When she was finished, she came back to him, thrumming with unspent energy.

The clouds were clearing, scooting off to ring the horizon in billowy white. The sun hung unveiled, casting Rey's flyaway hair in gold and highlighting her multitude of freckles. She filled his world suddenly, flushed and bright-eyed, bending down to kiss him. She sank to the ground without breaking contact, one leg bending across his, one hand pushing her practice blade out of the way before coming up to grip the collar of his shirt.

She was getting better at kissing.

When the heat of her mouth and her hands and her _tongue_ dragged out his breath in an inadvertent groan, she stopped. She came away just enough to look at him. Her lips were so picturesquely kiss-swollen that he had to touch them, pressing a thumb into the pillowy flesh, marveling at the color and softness and even at the layer of wind-dried skin that cracked into fine white lines where he pressed.

She smiled at something she saw in his eyes.

"I don't remember teaching you how to do that," he said when he had enough of his wits back to put one word in front of another.

"Finn and Poe did." She had not been blushing before. She was now. "I mean... I didn't... It was over the comm. They just talked about it. Things they liked. I thought—I wanted to see..."

Ben chuckled at her stuttering. "Don’t be shy." If anything, she blushed brighter at that, so he kissed her on the forehead and murmured, lips still touching her brow, "what else did they teach you?" because there was more. He could feel it in the buzz of anticipation under her skin. He tried to imagine how the conversation with Poe and Finn had gone, but that line of thinking fell apart when she tilted her head and closed her teeth on the tender skin beneath his jaw.

His breath snagged at the sharp, sudden pain, but then she was sucking and kissing at the spot and his eyes nearly rolled back into his skull. This was something new. New for Rey, and almost forgotten for Ben. He pressed his fingers into her scalp, tilting his head up and exposing his neck to her without a thought, encouraging her with a whisper of her name.

Instead, she paused, her breath hot on his skin. "Is this okay?"

"Yes, but..." He felt the hint of a smile that stretched his lips and turned his head to let her see it. "Did Finn and Poe tell you to bite me?"

Rey settled back, still splayed over his lap, radiating embarrassment and a jumbled desire to be as close to him as physically possible. He could see in her mind, unguarded, an urge to press every inch of herself against him just to know what it felt like, and yet, instead, she braced herself as if she were preparing to back off. "Um... They mentioned it."

He caught her arm to keep her there. "Are you sure they were giving you romantic advice?"

He was trying to project amusement, but she was too caught up in her own doubts to pay attention. "I won't do it again if..."

"I said it was okay."

"Oh." She processed that, along with the telltale grip of his hand on her arm. "Only okay?"

Ben summoned up a smirk worthy of Kylo Ren. "Do it again and I'll try to think of a better word."

This was the point at which Brell cleared her throat, loudly, and said in her most pointed tone, "those curtains you put up this morning looked nice. Maybe you should put them to use."

Wide-eyed, Rey stood up, clumsy in a mix of haste and reluctance. She took a breath to say something to Brell, stopped, bit her lip, and addressed Ben instead. "We don't have to... if you don't want. We can... um, go see what Luke is doing."

"Luke is meditating," Ben said. It took only a second and a half of concentration to sense that. "We shouldn't disturb him."

"Oh." She didn't quite sound relieved, and yet... "Do you want to go back to the hut?"

"Yes."

The anticipation that surged through Rey was palpable. She extended a hand to help him up, leaving her wooden sword abandoned on the sand. Another time, Ben might have critiqued her for the willful act of negligence. Just then it didn't matter.

Her hair was coming undone from its braid. When they were back inside the hut, he made it an excuse to slip off the tie and work his fingers through it until it all fell free, crimped in pretty little waves.

They left the lantern off by unspoken agreement. The light filtering through the curtains was enough, casting the stone chamber in dusky blue. It softened things, and Ben found himself suffering familiar doubts about the reality of his surroundings. Rey was the only thing real here. She kissed him like she wanted to devour him. She felt electric under his lips and fingertips, almost buzzing, and it took him longer than it should have to recognize an effect of the Force. She was doing something strange with it, weaving it over her skin until every touch tingled. He wondered if this was something Finn had suggested, or if she had come up with it herself. He wondered if she even knew what she was doing.

He was going to ask, but then one of the hands that had been resting at his waist snaked up under his tunic, making him twitch away in reflex, and then press into the startling touch. "Rey..."

"Do you want me to stop?"

"No."

"Can you take this off?" She meant his shirt.

He treated the question like a command, acting before his reservations could catch up. Only afterwards, when the garment was in his hands, did he think about what she would see underneath.

The dim light, at least, did something to lessen the starkness of his scars.

Rey had known what to expect. He could sense that much over the bond, along with the flash of an image. She had seen him in the bacta tank after the battle with Snoke.

Now, however, she was able to touch, and she had no qualms about doing so. Ben fought down a shiver as her hand skated up his ribs, feeling out the hollow made by the bowcaster wound, tracing the line of an older scar near his sternum, and then pressing into a burn mark at his left shoulder. "I made this one, didn't I?"

He stilled her hand under his and lifted it to his lips, kissing her knuckles. "It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does. Where did you get these other scars?"

"Training, mostly."

"Training?" Her voice turned shrill on the word. The look on her face was a pinched mix of outrage and sympathy.

"Why is it important?"

"Because... What kind of training?"

He mustered a crooked smirk. "Not the kind I would like to describe while half-naked and alone with you."

Her expression flickered, visibly processing the conversation, and settled in the end on a smile.  
  
It was, thankfully, enough to end that discussion, but then Rey had her mouth on his bare skin, tenderly kissing each scar that littered his chest and shoulders, and Ben was at a loss. He had never been sentimental about his scars, with the exception of one. They had long stopped giving him pain, but Rey treated them as if they were fresh, as if she could heal them herself with pure adoration, and he felt awkward for it. He didn't know whether to reassure her or to let her indulge in this. She was so determined, after all, to fit his broken pieces back together.

When it became too much and his throat had gone tight, he stilled her with a finger curled under her jaw, tipping her head up to kiss her properly. Rey took control of this too, splaying her hands on his chest, pushing him back one step, and then another. Suddenly the pallet was under his heels and he was sinking down, Rey following him like a deity descending.

For the span of that midday respite, there was nothing left to doubt. She told him what she wanted, in words and touch and thought, and he gave.

.

"Ben, have you... Was that..."

"What, Rey?"

"Have you done that before?"

"No. Once," he corrected himself. "Not… with a woman."

"Oh."

He turned his head and kissed her cheek, lingering there, closing his eyes in her radiant warmth. "Are you alright?"

"Yes."

"Do you need anything?"

"Who were they?"

"Who?"

"You said not a woman."

"Oh. One of Luke's students. It wasn't important."

"It wasn't?"

He tested the edges of their bond, concerned that she was jealous, but all he found was curiosity. "If it had been, I might have stayed."

The boy had taught him how to kiss, and then more. It had been a game, to begin with. They had been friends, or something like it, though Ben had never cared as much as he should have. Like the friendship, the sex had failed to live up to his expectations, and the latter had signaled the end of the former.

He thought afterwards that he simply didn't care for other boys. That theory had lasted until another occasion, in his early days as Kylo Ren, when one of his knights had tried her hand at seducing him—a bid for power and favor from her new leader.

He had been less than disinterested. He had been disgusted. Even thinking of it now dropped a pebble of ice into the sated heat that suffused him. With permission from Snoke, he had killed the knight. No one else had been so bold.

There were those who craved the touch of a lover as if it were an addiction. There were those who ogled or critiqued every member of their preferred gender. Ben had not been burdened with such distraction. Even his magnetic attraction to Rey had little to do with her physical form. He craved the touch of her hands in the way that any social animal craved affection, but he had wanted for little beyond that.

And he had, in an act of glaring shortsightedness, failed to put any serious thought into how much more Rey would ask for, and how soon.

The greatest relief was that the flare of her desire had not made him recoil as his last experience had. Beyond that, he could only be pleased—deeply, immensely pleased—that she found such pleasure in him.

She snuggled closer and he reached around her to cover them both with one of the blankets, feeling a ridiculous surge of protectiveness against Ahch-To's ceaseless cold.

"Is this from training too?"

"Hmm?"

"Here." She had stubbornly held back the edge of the blanket and was mapping a single white line that followed the vein of his wrist.

"I thought we were done talking about scars."

"Sorry."

He was the one to initiate the kiss, but she claimed mastery of it again, ending up on top of him with her hair curtaining his face and the blanket a tangle around their hips. There was a metaphor about futility there, in how recklessly his effort to keep her warm had been discarded. In spite of everything, it made him smile.

Too quickly then, she pushed herself up and left him alone on the pallet. "I need to pee. I'll be back."

He huffed at her desert-bred bluntness, but even that was endearing. Everything about her was a treasure, from her tangled hair to the careless way she scooped up her clothing and dressed, leaving the hut with only the slightest glance back.

When she was gone, he dawdled over garbing himself, reluctant to leave the rumpled nest of blankets. When that was done and she hadn't come back yet, he opened Leia's lockbox. It was a means of passing time, primarily, but he was still anxious about his mother’s visit.

Rey returned while he was reading the letter. By the look of her hair, she had made a stop at the Falcon's sonic shower. He had been trying not to track her through the bond, to give her privacy, and she didn't say a word on her return. She only cuddled up at his side and closed her eyes, careful not to read over his shoulder. Right then, he would not have minded if she had. There was nothing he did not want to share with her, only he didn't know how to phrase the invitation. At any rate, what was written in the letter would only make her feel sorry for him, and he didn't need any more of that.

He set the letter aside instead and turned to put both arms around her. "What should we do with the rest of the day?"

"We should probably go check on Luke. I’m sure he has more training for us."

He scowled. "Are there any other options?"

"I guess... we could meditate, or something. As long as we're doing something useful, he shouldn't mind."

He nuzzled the crook of her neck. "What we did just now was useful."

Rey snorted. "It was, but I don’t think Luke wants to know about it."

"He might have sage advice." He was joking, but it was probable that Luke already knew. Such moments of high emotion left marks in the Force like signal flares. "If we meditate, I might fall asleep."

This, for some reason, made Rey smile. "That’s fine."

.

Leia arrived two days later.

For a moment, Ben thought he was reliving a memory. She came not in one of the clunky, heavily armored transports she favored during warfare missions, but in a sleek and shining ship he had expected never to see again. The Mirrorbright should have been lost with the Hosnian system. He could not guess where else she would have stashed it, if not there. Certainly there was little use for a noble's cruiser on a cramped Resistance base.

He would ask her about it, if he could work up the nerve, but not now. He couldn't think about it now, as the boarding ramp began it's stately descent. He still had no idea how he would speak to her at all. The act of opening his mouth and forming words addressed to his mother seemed as farfetched and implausible as jumping to the next system without a starship. This was a mistake, it had to be. Whatever she found here couldn't possibly be enough. No amount of goodness in him could make up for the things he had done. Even as Leia appeared at the top of the ramp and found him with her eyes, he could not imagine a future between them that was unspoiled by the past, nor a day when he would look at her without feeling that knifeblade of regret.

But then Rey was beside him, and she was holding his hand, and he could let out the breath he had held. There was pain in the future, yes. There always would be, but maybe—just maybe—the pain would be worth the rest. Maybe it was simply the cost of rebuilding his life.


	10. If I Break For You

The wind stung his eyes and numbed his ears, chilled him and sapped the moisture from his skin. It was harder to ignore than it should have been. In the weight of the impending moment, even the insignificant seemed enormous.

There was something surreal about his mother's transport landing alongside his father's freighter, the glossy elegance of one emphasizing the scorched humility of the other. So too was his mother's appearance in contrast with itself, an offsetting image of regal bearing and humble dress. Ben was trapped, enslaved by the sight of her, able only to bear witness as Leia Organa Solo took her first steps upon the windy hillside of Ahch-To.

She looked small. She had looked smaller the last time he had seen her, hunching over a balcony to watch as he was sent into exile. She looked old, but not as old as he had imagined. There was still a sheen of tawny brown in the gray of her braided hair, still a flush and vivaciousness under the frown lines and crow's feet.

He was so lost in the details of her face as she neared that it took him by surprise when she stopped, suddenly and finally there. She was not two paces out of reach, too solid to be a fantasy. Real the way Rey was real, in the erratic and impossible dream that was his life. The frown on her face as she looked at him was frank and familiar.

"Well..." The ability to speak seemed to be giving her a struggle, but she was stronger than him. "You look better than you did the last time I saw you."

Ben couldn't work his lungs. Beside him, Rey squeezed his hand, then let go and stepped away.

When it was clear he wouldn't answer her, Leia took a breath, put her hands on her hips, and scolded. "Did you forget all those manners I taught you?"

He tried very hard to say hello. He pulled in air through his nose and let it build up under that single word until the only way left for it to go was out, but the word that escaped him instead was "Mother."

"Oh, Ben." The mask she had worn, thorough yet fragile as a piece of paper, fell to pieces. She took the last two steps and Ben fought not to flinch away when she reached up. A panic rose in his chest when he thought she would hug him, but she only put her hands on his arms and stopped there, tense with restraint. Perhaps she sensed his terror, or perhaps she was fighting her own. "You've grown," she said, and the words cracked like firewood. "I didn't think you would get any taller."

He didn't feel tall. He felt like a child waking from a nightmare, shaken and unsure of what was real and what was a dream. He wanted to fall to his knees, to put his arms around her and press his face into her skirt, to hide there until she touched his hair, until she told him that it was okay. Then, perhaps, he would look up and see the bedroom he had slept in when he was six. He would see his toys and his clothes, his collection of datapads and holovids full of adventure stories his dad had given him. Then he would tell her about the voice in his head, and she would tell Han and Uncle Luke, and they would make it so that he never had to hear that voice again.

None of this happened. He was not a six-year-old boy. He did not go to his knees before her. He stood unmoving, and Leia indulged herself only a little longer in the comfort of physical contact, reaching up at last to touch the scar on his face—the same place where Han had touched him in their final moments. Maybe she sensed that too.

Then she stepped back, and neither of them knew what to do next.

"Leia, do you want to come inside?" Rey put in an effort to rescue them both. "Who flew the ship? They can come too."

"I asked Greer to wait on board," Leia answered, barely audible over the sea and wind. "She doesn't need to see a weepy family reunion, trust me." She spared another sad-eyed glance at Ben and then stepped around him, letting Rey lead her to the cooking hut.

"Did you bring anyone else?"

"C-3PO, but he's powered down at the moment." There was a touch of slyness in her tone, faint and fleeting, but Ben knew it when he heard it. The timing on the droid's downtime had been intentional.

"Not Artoo?"

Leia's eyes tightened with a smirk that failed to reach her lips. "Oh, he tried. The hardest part of leaving was keeping him from stowing away. He misses Luke."

"Luke misses him too."

"And I told him he can come back when the fighting's done," Luke said, managing to look dramatic as he stepped from the hut. "Hello Leia."

"Luke." The siblings embraced, Leia sinking into it with all that she had held back from Ben. "Thank you for this." She wasn’t talking about her visit.

"He's my nephew. I wouldn't be much of a Jedi if I turned him away when he wanted help."

Ben recalled what Luke had said during their training—that he wasn't a Jedi at all—but he swallowed the temptation to sass his uncle about it. With Leia there, he'd barely be able to pronounce the words anyway.

Rey suggested again that they move inside, and Luke rather too gleefully started serving tea. He had been trying for a long time, Ben recalled, to convince Leia to pay him a visit. For his own part, Ben haunted the doorway until Rey sidled up and put her chin on his shoulder to whisper, "you okay?"

"No."

"Sit down."

That sounded like an order, whether she meant it to or not. In his stupor, he almost thanked her for it. Being told what to do made the daunting prospect easier. He sat crosslegged as close to Leia as he dared and wrapped his hands around the hot cup of tea Luke passed him.

"Were Finn and Poe and Rose able to get away?" Rey asked, sitting across from Ben.

"Get away?" Leia echoed. "Oh, their honeymoon. No, I'm afraid not. We couldn't spare them."

Rey looked crestfallen. "I guess when the war's over, then."

"We'll all be celebrating then." Leia aimed a tentative smile at Ben. He couldn't return it, but he met her eyes for most of a second. Then she was focused on Rey again. "How goes the training?"

"Well, I think." Rey turned the cup in her hands, idly. "I know Luke keeps you updated."

"Luke doesn't tell me everything." There was a lilt to the words and a tilt to her smile that made the statement teasing. Ben wondered in dread what Luke had told her, whether or not an exiled murderer had the privilege of privacy, but he was far from ready to brooch that subject, and Rey was pretending to be distracted by her tea.

"Classen. Brell." The guards had turned up as a pair to observe the arrival of their general, but had so far been exercising their talent for being inconspicuous. Their gazes snapped in unison to Leia when she addressed them. "How are you holding up? Do I need to send a relief team?"

"It's boring out here," Brell said frankly, "but the company could be worse." She tilted her head towards her partner. "Classen?"

The more stoic of the pair said, without inflection, "I'm enjoying the show."

Ben pressed his lips shut on a suggestion that Classen enjoyed it more because he'd won credits on it.

Leia answered with a dry smile. "As long as you're all getting along here, I'm inclined to leave things as they are. Let me know if you change your minds."

Ben kept his eyes fixed steadily on the table and hoped they wouldn't. Bets and playful jabs aside, he could hardly expect anyone else to be as tolerable, let alone as tolerant.

The conversation continued sporadically, littered with false starts and flighty topic changes. Ben caught himself making an effort not to listen, to drown it out with his own thoughts, waiting for a chance to escape from the sideways glances of his mother, too full of hurt and hope. The longer he brooded as the others talked around him, the more he was convinced that inviting her here had been a mistake. There were too many frayed edges, landmines under every road of thought, and he wasn't the only one who felt them. Ben wondered, wistful, if it would always be this way. Some wounds that never healed, regardless of what Rey and Luke thought. The best Ben could hope for was that the scar tissue would be thick enough, one day, to block out the sting.

Rey was on the edge of his mind, probing at his discomfort. She said nothing of it, she barely looked at him, but when one of the frequent breaks in the conversation gave her an opening, she offered to show Leia around the village. Ben expected Leia to ask him along, but she seemed to catch on to Rey's intent. With a mercifully brief parting, they were gone.

Luke afforded him one pointed glance and then went about clearing the table. Taking the unspoken offer, Ben made his escape.

His first instinct was to go to the garden, but surely that would be included on Leia's tour. He turned instead in the opposite direction, intending to find some quiet, insignificant place in the maze of crumbling stonework.

He hadn't made it out of sight of the cooking lodge when C-3PO jostled into his path with trademark bad timing. The droid must have finished his nap. "Oh! Master Ben! How good to see you. Are you well? The princess has been worried sick about you!"

"You know she hates it when you call her that." The response came automatically, tailed by a jolt of memory from his youth, uttering the same reminder on too many occasions. He shouldered past the droid, regretting that he had responded at all.

"Well, I don't see why," Threepio rambled. "It is her title. As it is yours too, if you want it."

"Princess Ben?" He was teasing again despite his better judgment. Perhaps it was the release from his muteness in Leia's presence, making his tongue wag unchecked.

" _Prince_ Ben."

"What would I be prince of? The dust of Alderaan?"

"Well, it's better than Kylo Ren, if you ask me."

Ben let the name wash over him, suppressing the inner jolt that came with it. Luke and Rey both tended to dance around it unless they were making a point, and generally he appreciated that, but he worried that he was allowing himself to be sheltered too much. If he ever got off this planet, he would doubtless have that name thrown at him along with all the deeds that went with it. "... I think I've had enough of titles, if it's all the same to you."

It was, of course, not all the same to a protocol droid, but Threepio had enough sense to let it slide at merely the cost of a feigned sigh. "I suppose Ben Solo will do." His tone was one of lamentation. "Your father was a war hero and an honorable man, after all."

"I hope you never called him that to his face."

"Of course not." Threepio seemed offended by the suggestion. "Han Solo expressly told me not to call him honorable. Fourteen times."

"Uh huh..." Ben almost smiled, but that would have been giving the droid too much encouragement. "And how many times has my mother told you not to call her princess?"

"Three thousand and twenty-six times, to date."

"That's what I thought."

If it was true that his grandfather had programmed C-3PO's personality, the fool had badly overlooked the concept of taking a hint. "I can't tell you how glad I am that you gave up that First Order business. Princess Leia told me all about how that Supreme Leader Snoke was lying to you. If only it had been brought to my attention sooner, I could have set the records straight. We might have avoided this whole mess."

"You're right." He lacked the energy, suddenly, to be annoyed with the droid. "I should have told someone. It's my fault it went this far."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean it like that!" Threepio backpedaled, hands in the air. "It was entirely Snoke's fault, and besides, it's all over now."

“I'm glad you feel that way," Ben kept his voice flat, his vision focused intently on the paving stones in front of him.

"Of course, Master Ben. And, if I may say so, Princess Leia feels the same."

"I know." They had nearly reached the isolated corner Ben was aiming for, but he wasn’t inclined to share the location with the droid. Instead, he stopped and turned to face him, crossing his arms for lack of knowing what else to do with them. "Threepio, do you remember my grandfather?"

"Master Anakin? I'm afraid my memory of him has been erased. I'm terribly sorry. You would have better luck asking R2-D2, but even then, I can't guarantee that he'll be any help. You know how he is..."

"Never mind. Thank you."

"I only wish that I could help more," Threepio lamented. "I am only a protocol droid."

"You've done enough," Ben assured him, struck by a guilty sense of compassion for the machine. "Why don't you go see if Luke needs help with anything?"

"Of course." Threepio's mood brightened. "Now that you mention it, Artoo requested that I pass on a message to Master Luke. He said—”

Ben stalled him with a raised hand. "His message is for Luke. You should go deliver it."

"Yes, of course." C-3PO started to shuffle away, then paused. "It's been so nice talking to you, Master Ben. I hope we can do it again before the princess decides to leave."

"I'll see you later, Threepio." That was, finally, enough to send the droid on his way, and Ben retreated swiftly behind the nearest row of huts to his chosen hiding spot.

"At least droids forgive easily," offered Classen.

"He isn't programmed to hold grudges," Ben dismissed, wondering why the guard had to choose that moment to break from his usual stoicism. He felt exhausted after Threepio's eccentric idea of politeness.

"And he was built by Darth Vader?" Classen prodded.

"Darth Vader wasn't always Darth Vader."

"That sounds familiar."

Ben met his gaze wearily, trying to impart a warning. Classen, unlike Threepio, could take a hint. He squared his shoulders and put on his usual impassive expression. Ben proceeded to ignore him.

He did not meditate—not properly. He sat and let his mind wander, prodding gently now and then at the tender spots. His mother's presence on the island was a source of ceaseless anxiety, lapping at the edges, threatening to overflow and drown out his control if he let it. In counterpoint, there was relief, and something deeper he had no name for. It was something like coming home after a long journey, not having known if it would still be there, nor if it would still feel like home.

And then there was Rey. For Rey, he felt resignation. There was still a part of him that balked at the thought of letting her in, of letting her touch his darkest corners and flirt with his explosive moods. It was a battle he would not win. Stronger than his anxious fretting was his need for her. He had never felt such boundless affection for another being, such constant desire to be close to someone. He considered the possibility that Snoke had been the one to deny him this, had shielded him from such tender, mortal cravings, even for his family. Once the idea came into his head, it was hard to doubt. He argued with himself against the blind certainty of it, in fear of his own inclination to jump to conclusions. Passing all the blame to Snoke was too easy. It was a familiar argument. He was responsible, and no matter how much Rey and Luke tried to comfort him, to forgive him, he had to hold onto that. To start thinking it had all died with Snoke would be a false security. A liability. Even if Snoke truly had a hand in stealing his ability to love, there was a part of him that had allowed it to happen.

He'd had this inner conversation before, but the pain remained fresh. The acknowledgment still stung. He took that to mean that he would need to keep having it, to repeat the dialogue until the wound had faded and set into yet another scar. They were, after all, such useful reminders.

He felt Rey's presence at the door of his mind, knocking politely. She had sensed the spike of his emotion and was checking up on him. He sent a wordless assurance and gently shut her out.

On the subject of Rey, and on love, as tempting as it was to ascribe his former lack thereof to some nefarious manipulation by Snoke, there was the simpler fact that he had never been in love before. He would not have been able to define it, except that the surge of devotion at every thought of her could hardly be anything else. The strange, painful joy at the mere knowledge of her existence was something he had felt for no one and nothing before her. He was thoroughly, indisputably, disastrously in love with her.

He had seen the way others loved. He had felt it when their walls were down. He knew how his mother had loved his father—a stubborn and persistent affection, rueful and joyful at the same time. Han had made Leia feel young and alive. Powerful. Something in his cocky influence had infected her, rekindling her own rebel-born fever and making her feel as if she could take on all the galaxy. Even their bickering she had loved, as frustrating as it had been at times. Leia's love was like a low fire that resisted the wind and the rain, a brooding star that burned cold but long. Leia's love could hunker down, cling to the embers, and wait. Wait for the rain to cease and the wind to slow, until the flames could rise again in undying glory. That was how Leia had loved Han.

Leia's love for her son had the same resilience, but it was more selfless and more singular. She had made him. He was hers and she would protect him, always. She had known him in the first moments of his consciousness, known him in ways not even most mothers could know their children, and she had loved what she had known. Nothing he did or became would change that, as long as some piece of her son still lived. This he had sensed when he was a child, though Snoke had turned him bitter to the knowledge, and this he had felt again on when she greeted him on the mountainside.

Rey's love for him was different. Where Leia was like a banked campfire, Rey was unrestrained. There had been no love of any sort in her life for all of her years on Jakku, and now she had it in abundance. Her love for Ben was not so different from her love for the rest of her new family, but that was changing by the day. Rey lived by adapting to her environment. Likewise, her love adapted to what was offered her. Childlike—for her childhood had been cut short—she was open and willing to change and to experience. As long as her love was nourished, it would grow. Rey's love was a wildfire, strong enough to bare its face to the rain and burn on.

Ben's love was a supernova.

He had suffered lifelong from an obsessive personality, had been prone to fixating, to devoting the whole of himself to a single purpose. His attachment to Rey was no different. While Rey thrived on what was given to her, while Leia fueled her love on the ashes of long-ago things, Ben's love consumed him from the inside out. It would make no difference if Rey spent the rest of her life with him or if he never saw her again. He would devote any purpose to her, would live his life for her memory, or on the hope of doing something that would please her. He would be her willing servant, her guardian, her mentor, or her lover. He would strive to be anything and everything that she needed. He would live or die or kill for her. That was the nature of Ben's love.

"Do you love anyone, Classen?"

"I have a wife," Classen answered, sounding unfazed by the intimate question.

"I didn't know."

"You didn't ask."

"Where is she?"

"Right now, D’Qar."

"It must be difficult being away from her."

"I call her when I'm not on shift." The guard smiled tightly. "Except when you broke the comm. I had to tell her about that."

"Oh,” Ben said. “Sorry."

"Uh huh."

"What's her name?" He didn’t care, particularly, but he did not feel averse to the casual conversation, for once.

"Avalee."’

“How long have you known her?”

“We were kids together.” Classen was the one beginning to look uncomfortable, likely unnerved by his ward’s chattiness.

“Convenient.”

“A bit less dramatic than your way.”

“Hm.” Ben didn't ask any more. Taciturn Classen was not the most ideal person for practicing small talk on.

Without that distraction, it was all he could do not to track Rey's every step through the Force. When he could no longer contain himself, he found the line that lay between them and sent along it a pulse of anxious curiosity. Her acknowledgment came prompt and he heard a mental echo of her voice. She was suggesting to Leia that they turn around.

That had not been his intention, but he didn't know what else he had expected. Too restless to stand still, he paced the worn paths, struggling against the pull in his chest to flee, to run to the border of his island prison and farther, to become the wind, the tide, or the rocky shore. Better not to exist—said his traitorous gut—than to continue this ill-planned reunion. Better to spare her his broken self, his irreparable failings.

He didn’t listen. Not this time. He knew what Rey would say, and his mother. He didn’t entirely believe that they would be right, but he trusted them both more than he trusted himself, so he waited.

Rey, upon reuniting with him, withheld the kiss she plainly wanted to give and settled instead for tucking her hands around his arm. There was something different… something heavy behind her eyes, but even through the Force, he could not decipher it.

"Come on," she said with too much cheer. "We were going to see the garden."

For all that Rey had lacked in early socialization, she possessed an instinct for what people needed. By taking charge and pulling him into the ongoing tour, he realized that she was letting him be near his mother without putting him in the spotlight. It wouldn't last, but it would give him that much more time to adjust.

Leia seemed to have caught on, or else she felt the same as he did, and gave him only a sidelong smile as Rey resumed the lead.

"Ben's been helping me garden."

"You mentioned that." Leia did not seem opposed to hearing it again.

"He's good at it."

"I'm not," Ben grumbled, and then was pleased with himself for having been able to say anything at all.

"You haven't killed anything except what I've told you to. That counts as being good at it."

It seemed a low standard for judgment, but he let her have the last word.

"Maybe we should have had a garden when you were growing up," Leia mused.

"Hm."

The light was slanting golden over the garden wall, filtering through the leaves in a bright haze. It was too idyllic. It made Ben angry. It seemed unfair that the little plot of land could make itself so welcoming to Leia while he could barely look at her. He didn't think he had ever been jealous of a garden before.

There was another off-putting wave of emotion from Rey. It was not quite nostalgia, and a little too close to regret. She blocked him out almost as soon as he had felt it, which only served to alarm him further, but she was smiling and her eyes were bright, reflecting the green and gold of the garden. Perhaps it was an old sadness. It would not have been the first time he caught her lamenting the desolation of her childhood.

Leia found the bench and sat down while Rey rambled about their exploits in herbology, leaving out the mishap with Ben's hands. Leia prompted her with questions about their overall lifestyle on Ahch-To and Rey talked of fishing and wood-gathering in tones of joy. To hear her tell it, the island was a rustic paradise. It surprised him, though he supposed it made sense that she would form a bias for the place that had become a haven for her. Ben basked in the sound of her voice—his own haven—and eventually, somewhere during a description of Luke's cooking, he found the nerve to sit down on the bench beside his mother.

Leia was plainly trying to contain her pleasure, and kept her tone carefully mild when she asked him, "do you cook, Ben?"

"I try."

"He does fine," Rey said. "He also braids hair." She took the opportunity to show off the ones he had done for her that morning, though surely Leia had already noticed them.

"That brings back memories. I don't suppose..." She trailed off, then, breathing in deep, she straightened her spine. Her smile sobered into the smooth face she tended to wear when approaching a tricky political situation. "Mine's coming loose in the wind." It was not a lie. "If you don't want to..." She was going to say that she would understand, or that she would forgive him if he didn't want to touch her. He opened his mouth to refute the idea, but closed it again without success, relapsing into the muteness of earlier. Instead, he turned on the bench to face her and raised his hands in invitation.

Leia took the hint and put her back to him. As Ben unwound the remains of her wind-ruffled braid and combed her hair with his fingers, she resumed her conversation with Rey. They spoke this time of others worlds visited, trading stories of trivial curiosities. Feeling creative, Ben wove a pair of interlaced plaits along one side of Leia's head, tying them off in a bun at the back while Leia talked of Endor and Ewoks and listened to Rey's tales of outlandish desert-going traders.

He worked slowly, with care and precision, for once he had started, he found he didn't want to stop. More to the point, he was afraid to stop. Braiding his mother's hair gave him a clear-cut purpose while fulfilling the requirement of familial interaction. It was only a pebble thrown into the gaping chasm between them, but it felt good. It was something he could do for her without having to fumble for words, or to fear making things worse.

Although he had feared the end even as he looped the last strands into place, the reduced tension lingered between them when the act was done. He was able to smile while Leia explored the pattern by touch and Rey gleefully described it to her. Then Leia turned to catch his eyes, and for a moment he thought that she would try to hug him, but she only smiled and said, "Thank you, Ben. I think you're even better at that than you used to be. You didn't pull at all."

"I practice on Rey." It was a foolish repeat of what Rey had said already, but at least his voice came easily this time. He took advantage of it while it lasted. "I missed it, Mother."

Now she did touch him, but only with the palm of her hand, sweeping back the hair that hung loose over his face. "Me too."

With that, the tension returned and Ben dropped his gaze, shrinking away as much as his tall frame allowed. Leia retreated in her own stately way, rising and dismissing herself with a comment of, "I should go find Luke. There are things I need his opinion on. Rey, about that matter we discussed, you don't have to..."

"My answer is still yes," Rey said, and Ben felt again that strange sorrow from her, wrapped this time in resolve.

He could read, of all things, a sense of guilt underlying Leia's words when she replied, "talk to him about it." Then she left the two alone but for Classen, who stood in his usual silence.

Ben looked to Rey.

Rey no longer looked gleeful or exuberant.

He prodded at her mind, but she was still closed to him. Forced to make another attempt at verbal speech, he pitched his question low. "What is it?"

"Leia needs me to go back with her."

The words didn't make sense. He replayed them in his head, probed again at her defenses, and still came out lost. "What?"

"You heard her earlier. They need another Force user. She couldn't even spare Finn for a few days."

His brow furrowed as the pieces came together, too slowly. He didn't want to believe the picture they made. "You're leaving?"

"Not forever."

"Rey..." _I need you_ , he didn't say.

She heard it anyway. "You'll be okay."

He was angry suddenly, exploding up from the bench to pace, erratic, five strides one way and three the other. "I thought the Resistance was winning!" His voice echoed off the garden walls, louder than he intended.

"They are, but..."

Four paces both ways this time. "Will you make any difference?"

Rey huffed. He hadn't meant it as an insult, but she wasn't letting him get away with the slip. "Yes, I will. Listen, they've got the First Order pinned down, under siege, but they can't break them. The longer it drags out, the more people die. I can finish this."

Of course she could. (Another three steps.) He didn't doubt that. (And four in the other direction.) With the situation described, he could see it clearly. The First Order was a ship disabled, and Rey would be the missile that smashed through the hull. That did nothing to quell his frustration. If anything, it made it worse. She was leaving and he didn't have so much as a valid argument to make her stay—none except that he needed her, and that wasn't good enough.

He stilled his pacing, taking a long breath and releasing it before he tried again. "Please don't go."

"I have to."

"I love you," he said.

"I know." She closed the space between them and reached up to turn his face toward hers, to capture a kiss. There she held him, drawing out the moment as if she meant to stop time, to never let the sun set and never to depart. When time continued in spite of her best efforts, she promised him, "I'll come back."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding music, I've been listening to a lot of Vienna Teng. For this chapter, Antebellum and The Last Snowfall.
> 
> Regarding art, there is a commissioned piece by Elithien here: http://elithien.tumblr.com/post/161642605341/elithien-ren-braiding-his-mothers-hair


	11. If We Gather Fallen Stars

His mother would stay a day and a night. She would have stayed longer, but what progress had been made between them was stalled under the weight of Rey's decision.

He was furious with Leia—too furious to look at her—and he was perfectly aware that she did not deserve it. That only left him furious and guilty. An answering guilt echoed back along the Force-lines connecting him to her and to Rey, and from Luke he received only thin patience. He wanted neither.

In the isolation of Ahch-To's sparse and haunted woods, he sulked and he seethed and he knocked down the biggest tree he could find. The sound of its splintering trunk was like a scream, a death cry punctuated by the rattle and snap of its limbs as they broke under its own weight. It was not as satisfying as he had wanted it to be, and he loitered about afterwards in a tense sort of limbo, but Rey did not let him wait long. She came stomping through the undergrowth without a word of greeting and sat down on the ground behind him, staring at his back and at the Force-torn tree. Her presence drained his fury, lancing the wound of it and leaving him in a state of dull exhaustion.

"Don't blame Leia," she said when he was ready to listen. "I was going to volunteer anyway, if she hadn't asked."

But Leia had asked, he wanted to say. She might have argued instead to have Rey stay for her son's sake. It was a selfish opinion and he didn't speak it, but Rey heard it all the same.

"I want to do this. I want it to be over." There was sudden emotion in her voice, flaring across the bond. She was tired, like him, and sad, and angry. She despaired for everything lost and all that still might be. The Resistance was her family, and every life ended in the war took a piece of her with it. Every day that it dragged on while she languished in her exile-by-choice was another pound of guilt upon her shoulders. She was here to help Ben and she loved that, and she loved him, but she was torn. If he could do without her, just for a little while, just long enough...

She knew that he was reading all of this. She made no effort to block him out. It was easier to communicate this way than to stumble over spoken words.

Ben let it hang between them, the muddled frustration and exhaustion. It wasn't as simple as Rey wanted it to be. He could not dismiss his feelings and let it go with a smile.

But he would let her go. It wasn't his choice to make.

"I would go with you."

"I know."

They left the tree as it had fallen. Only Classen gave it a farewell glance over his shoulder. It would make good firewood later, when it had dried. Ben sympathized with it, despite having been its murderer. He too was a helpless observer without the power to go where he willed, left to rot while those around him chased their destinies.

The sun was still high and Ben had no idea how he would pass the rest of the day. He at once wished it was over and dreaded it. He wanted nothing more to do with his mother—not until he could make himself forgive her—but he would suffer her presence if it meant a little more time with Rey.

Rey did not read his mind. He would have felt it if she had. Nevertheless, she knew what to do.

"Come with me." Offering her hand, she led him not to the huts, but to the sparring ring again. He hung back when he saw where they were going, but she persisted. "We don't have to fight. We'll just do warm-ups. It's better than knocking down trees."

They stayed for hours.

Rey set the pace, starting with the easiest of exercises, elegant stretches and slow-motion sweeps of the blade. Ben concentrated on matching the long, purposeful breaths she took, standing not opposite her, but beside her. He had no need to watch her. Each move she made created ripples in the Force around them, painting an image of her in his mind as clear as sight.

Eventually they did spar. It began as choreographed as the warm-ups had been, simple strikes and counters, testing each other's mood rather than each other's skill. It evolved only gradually into a proper contest, which Ben won with his wooden sword held diagonal across Rey's chest. She had landed three glancing blows to his legs prior to this end. His height was not always an advantage.

They sat together afterwards and shared from the waterskin Rey habitually carried. Ben took only small sips, his chest aching with the urge to speak and the fear that any conversation would turn inevitably to Rey's departure.

Rey, for the third time that day, was able to read him and adapt. "I've been thinking, once we find a way to get you off this planet, where do you want to live?"

It seemed a stupid question at first. "Where you are."

"I know, but what system? What planet? Do you want to live in a city, or somewhere quieter?"

He dug his fingertips into the gritty arena sand, trying to orient his thoughts. "I don't know. I don't know that I'll have much choice."

"Why not?"

Again, it seemed a stupid question. "I doubt many people will want to be the neighbor of Kylo Ren."

Rey shrugged. "It's a big galaxy."

She wasn't wrong. As many planets as the Republic had influence over, and as many even as the Empire had once controlled, there were still more that had nothing to do with either. As much as the war and the politics made it seem otherwise, there were places he could go where no one would know his face. "I want to travel." It surprised him when he said it. It was not something he had put thought into before.

Rey was grinning. "Okay. We'll take the Falcon and travel. Where do you want to go first?"

"I don't know."

"I want to see Chewbacca's homeworld," she supplied eagerly. "He says the trees are as high as Coruscant's towers. And I want to see more Jedi ruins. Luke has maps. And... and I want to go back to Jakku." This last she added more shyly. "I left some things. They might still be there."

Ben couldn't help but smile at her enthusiasm, just a little. "Alright. That's what we'll do."

"And maybe when we've been to all those places," she said with a teasing lilt, "you'll know where you want to go."

"Maybe."

They drifted into silence together, warm and entirely different from that which had thickened the air between himself and Leia. He was not keen to break it, but his thoughts piled up in a lump behind his tongue until one slipped loose. "Rey, could you..." He bit his lip to catch the words, but now that he had spoken, he would have to finish the thought. Otherwise she would ask, and he didn't have the energy to redirect her.

As always, she was sensitive to his tension. "What is it? You okay?"

The dirt had been scuffed in patterns around his boots, and pressed into ridges by his restless fingers. He stared at it instead of meeting her eyes. "I need..." His voice crackled and snagged in this throat. He knocked a mental fist against his skull to rattle the words loose. "I need orders."

He could feel her trying to make sense of the request before she gave up and asked for clarification. "What do you mean?"

"Tell me what to do. Anything. I can't... I used to..." He sighed. There wasn't any right way to explain. Not, at least, with words. "Please."

Rey was frowning at him, brow creased low. "Like Snoke?"

"No. Yes. I..." And yet he was afraid to open the bond and let her feel what he felt. He thought it would disgust her. "I don't know what to do."

Rey glanced aside, considering. He felt the throb of the Force when she understood. It sat like an aura around her, breathing with her, pulsing in cadence with every thought and intent. "You're free of him. You should be making your own choices."

"Please," he said.

"Will it help?"

"Yes,” he said.

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

It was her turn to sigh. "I'll try."

He looked at her expectantly. She was studying him, touching his mind, sifting through the anxious muddle of his thoughts. He knew when she had found what she was looking for.

"Kiss me."

He felt the tension leave him. He made it brief, a chaste press of dry lips, parting quickly to see her reaction. It felt like it had felt the first time.

Like the first time, she was smiling. "Again."

This time her hands framed his face, thumb digging into the scar, making him feel her through the dead nerves. He kissed her slower, with purpose, with focus, centering his awareness on the place where lips met, trying to capture the essence of the act. He kissed her as if it were a song, each note writ with intent, complimenting the one before it. He put everything into fulfilling her command.

By the shudder of her breath and the half-lidded slant of her eyes, by the harmonizing melody across their bond, he thought she approved.

"Hold me," she murmured, and he obeyed, basking in the confidence that came with having a clear direction.

For the first time in days upon days, he thought about that dark and damaged corner of his mind—the hole where Snoke had been. Once a gaping wound, now its edges had knitted, tender to the touch but not aching, no longer driving him mad with the endless awareness of it. In spite of all his pessimism, he was beginning to heal.

With Rey in his arms, his hand sinking into the softness of her hair, he asked her, "what should I do when you're away?"

"Listen to Luke." She tucked her head under his chin, radiating contentment. "Work on controlling yourself so you can get off this rock."

"We still don't know if that will happen."

"It will." There was a firmness in her voice. "I'll make it happen."

His instinct was to argue. Not even his mother could sway politics in her favor every time. It occurred to him, though, that Rey was not talking about legalities. She would get him off Ahch-To, or try her damnedest, whether he had permission to leave or not.

.

It was a bitter night, although Rey put in a great effort to distract them both from it. She assured him again that she didn't want to leave. She would have given anything to bring him with her, or to stay, but there were lives at stake.

He asked her to stop talking about it.

Instead, with a tentative smile, Rey obliged his request for orders. Alone in their hut, on their nest of warm blankets, with only what starlight crept under the curtains to guide them, she found her stride and Ben found release, however fleeting.

In the morning, Rey went out and returned with their breakfast, knowing without asking that Ben was unready still to deal with his mother. He would forgive her—of course he would—but he had no wish to burden her with his mood until then. He didn't want to say something he might regret. It was better for both of them, he decided, if their reconciliation was put on hold.

Rey, with her impressively persistent optimism, pointed out that acknowledging even a half-done reconciliation was progress on his part. He sighed and brooded, but he soaked up her kisses and her caresses, and acquiesced when she asked him to braid her hair.

.

On the narrow field where the ships lay in rest, they made their farewells. There were no words. Those had been spoken already, or had passed between them in silence. They stood facing each other, hands clasped, and Ben did not kiss her, but bowed his head until his brow touched hers. When they separated, it was a mutual, unspoken decision. Rey looked back only once, from the foot of the boarding ramp, and sent him a wordless surge of affection. Then she was out of sight.

He didn't want to watch the vessel shrink and disappear amongst the clouds. He was too restless, all of a sudden, craving physical activity, needing to burn through the fresh wave of bitterness before it carried him away. He stalked past Luke, past the huts, down the winding descent to the arena. Rey's solution of the previous day had been a sound one. There had been many a time in the First Order when he had fallen back on strenuous exercise to relieve stress. When that was not an option, he had resorted to equally physical and more destructive coping measures.

Setting aside yesterday's felled tree, he was inclined to keep the violent outbursts a thing of the past.

He worked through saber forms until he was sweating in the cold wind. He worked while the rain came, first in scattered, halfhearted droplets, and then harder, committing itself to the fall, plastering his hair to his scalp and turning the sand under his boots to slush. Eventually, reluctantly, he slogged back up the trail, ignoring Brell's mutterings of relief.

Upon their return, Luke cast one look at them both and declared, "you look like drowned wamp rats. Have some tea."

Classen was there already, fussing over the comm unit which had been rendered into static by the storm. He gave up and put it away when Ben and Brell sat down. It was not yet evening, but the weight of the clouds and of the day's events conjured an illusion of nightfall. Luke obliged the whim of the weather and started supper early.

The surprise came in the form of Chewbacca, who ducked inside not long after, growling about the sound of the rain pounding on the Falcon's hull. His eyes met Ben's and then moved on, but even that unspoken acknowledgment was more than the norm. Ben sipped his tea and didn't mention it, but he found a sense of comfort in Chewbacca's presence. He was caught in the net of nostalgia still, at once reviling and cherishing the feeling.

The rain came in fits and starts, assaulting them with brief, heavy downpours interspersed with periods of sluggish drizzle, all of it accented with a wind that ebbed and surged like the sea.

When dinner was eaten and Luke was heating a third pot of tea, Ben gave up on waiting out the storm and skulked back to his own hut during one of the slower stretches. Brell saw him to the doorway, and then retreated into the neighboring structure rather than staying out to guard. He hadn't thought she was the sort to break a rule over inconvenient weather. Perhaps Leia had reevaluated the situation and changed the specifics of their duties. He was reluctant to take that for a good sign, but he couldn’t think what else it could be.

For too long, that night, he lay in a torpor, lulled by the patter of the rain and not quite able to sleep. At last, without bothering to move, he cast himself out along the thread that now hung there always, sailing up and up with the ease of a thought, piercing the seas of darkness between the stars until he found her ship and her bed and her welcoming awareness. He slept then, and so did she, holding hands with a hundred worlds between them.

In the morning, when predawn's fog away, he ventured out into the rain's mucky leavings, squinting in the harsh whiteness. His uncle's Force signature had lured him out, glaring and painful as the high, thin clouds. He tracked it up a segment of path he had no memory of exploring, at the end of which he came to one of the peaks of the island. Although he had taken his time and made no effort to be silent, neither of the guards had followed him. For a short while, until he reached the point where his uncle waited, he was strangely, blessedly alone.

"Have you eaten?" Luke asked by way of a greeting.

"No."

Luke produced a ration bar from somewhere in his robe. It was space travel fare, bland and tough, but rich in nutrition, or so the label said. Ben stuffed the disposable wrapper in his pocket and gnawed on a corner of it. He had eaten worse, but not since coming to Ahch-To.

"Do you only cook when Rey is here?"

"No." A pause. "But every meal is cooked when she’s here."

He recalled again how scrawny she had been when he met her on Takodona, how pale in spite of her desert life. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me as if I've been taking care of your pet."

Ben bit his tongue, alarmed by the implication. "That's not what I..."

Luke raised a hand. "I know." Again he let a pause hang between one statement and the next. "... I'm sorry."

Ben swallowed the bite he'd been working on and ignored the rest, coming instead to stand beside Luke and look down at the white-capped sea. "Uncle..."

Luke sighed, gruff, and the wind sighed with him. "The Force is strong in our family,” he said. “The Light and the Dark. We should have been prepared. I should have been... I cost you your youth. I'm sorry."

Ben didn't know how to respond to that outburst. His instinct was to reassure, to say that it was a fair price to pay for finding the love of his life, but that, he thought, would not comfort the man whose students he had murdered as part of that price. "It's in the past," he opted for, and wondered if even that was too callous.

"The past determines the present," Luke said. "Will you accept my apology?"

"Will you accept mine?"

Luke snorted—not quite the response Ben had expected. "I already did.”

Ben kept his gaze on the water, but he wasn't seeing it. Too many memories filled the space behind his eyes. Most prominently came the images from the album of a young, blond-haired Luke with an easy smile. That was what Ben had destroyed. That was what he was forgiven. "Thank you."

"Hm."

He risked a glance at his uncle. The old, stiff-shouldered Jedi had his arms crossed and looked as if he might boil the ocean with a glare. It was physically difficult to ask him for more. "... I have to get better."

"You are," Luke said.

"I have to be good enough to help Rey."

"What stops you from helping her now?"

Ben grimaced, but refrained from the obvious answer of exile. It wasn't what Luke meant. "I'm afraid... that I’ll lose control. That I will be temped to use the Dark Side if Rey is in danger."

"Are you still afraid of hurting her?"

"No."

"Then you've made progress."

"It's not enough."

"No," Luke agreed, "but the rest will come."

Ben hunched his shoulders, blinking against the wind that stung his eyes, pretending it was only the wind that made them water. "How?"

"How do you achieve confidence in anything?" There was a familiar tone of patience in Luke's words. Ben knew it from his childhood. His father had called it Luke's 'teacher' voice.

Ben sighed.

.

"Find the darkness within you. Acknowledge it. Reach out to it. Know its call, and resist it."

The old Jedi teachings held that a Force user who had succumbed to the darkness once would forever carry it with them, their resolve weakened by the exposure. Ben had little reason to shy from that risk if it were true. He could hardly be more tainted than he was.

If the Jedi had been wrong, however, as Luke believed, then Ben knew what it felt like to cross that line. He was confident—and surprised by his own confidence—that he would know it if he crossed it again.

The dark was generous, and it was patient, but though the dark would try to tell you otherwise, it did not always win.

It was not the subtlety of the darkness that he feared, in the end. What frightened him was his conscious willingness to use it again. Ahch-To was peaceful, a sanctuary despite its cold and damp. Here the only enemy he had was himself, and he had made great leaps towards peace even there. If he left, there would be other conflicts, either on the battlefield, in the council chamber, or on a public street. He might be cornered, or Rey might be put in danger. If that happened, he didn't trust himself not to fall back on the strengths he knew best.

In not so many words, he said as much.

"Then what you need," Luke answered, "is confidence in other strengths."

It was sound reasoning, but... "Are you suggesting we go back to basic training?"

"Just because you know how to lift rocks with your mind doesn't mean you should stop practicing. There is always a bigger rock."

Levitating boulders was not quite what he'd had in mind, but he was hardly in a place to argue. He understood the principle. It was like building a muscle, like refining a skill. One practiced the same maneuvers until one was adept. That didn't make it any less boring. At least toying with the darkness had kept him awake.

Luke practiced with him, which was at least not as offensive as if he had paced around and watched him like a school teacher. Instead it came off as an unnecessary courtesy. He would have preferred to be doing this with Rey.

"Concentrate."

Ben steadied the rock that had begun to wobble.

"You were thinking of Rey." The accusation was a gentle one, but an accusation all the same. "She's good for you. You have my blessing, but she can't be your crutch forever." Luke waved his hand and the boulder under his control began to rotate. "You need to stand on your own."

Ben mimicked his uncle's gesture with his hand and with the Force. "I don't have a history of making good decisions."

"No, but the fact that you acknowledge that is a step in the right direction."

"So, what then, I’ve already learned my lesson?"

"You're learning it." Luke passed his hand through the air a second time and his rock spun faster. "I wish I'd known how to teach it to you sooner."

Ben didn't bother with the hand-flailing this time. A mental nudge was all it took to keep his rock in pace with Luke's. "You already apologized." He was still trying to convince himself that he deserved it. He didn't think a repeat would make it easier.

A third time, Luke's hand moved and his boulder accelerated. It would have made a formidable weapon if it were thrown into a wall, or through a crowd of people. "I have my own guilt to atone for."

Ben followed suit and wondered silently whether the guilt Luke referred to was for losing his nephew to the darkness or for disappearing after. If Luke wanted to play at being his partner in redemption, he supposed he could cope with that. If nothing else, it might smooth a few of the bumps in their relationship.

Luke flung out a hand abruptly, stiffly, and his Force-suspended boulder shook itself to a halt, straining against its own velocity. Ben copied him. It was not difficult. He could freeze a blaster bolt in midair and hold it there with a fraction of attention. That strength didn't come from darkness. It never had. He had only been too steeped in the Dark Side to tell anything else apart.

Luke set his boulder down, so gently it didn’t make a sound. "Let's move on."

.

That night, when he reached out to Rey again, he found instead a desert. He could not feel any heat, but he was aware of the presence of it presence and the danger of it all the same. The sky was as brown as the sand, and he wondered if he need worry about sandstorms as well. There was no detectable wind, but that meant nothing in a dream.

The horizon around him was featureless. He could barely discern sand from sky. He tried instead to sense Rey's location in the Force, but she was all around him, himself in the heart of her subconscious. Coming up with no better option, he picked a direction and walked. Like as not, it wouldn't matter which way he went. The place he needed to be would come to him.

At first, there was nothing on the horizon. Then, at some point, he looked away, and when his gaze lifted again, there was a dark shape there, squat and motionless. When he saw it, he felt as if it had been there all along, as if it had been his reason for choosing that direction in the first place, yet he had been sure a moment before that there was only emptiness. The lump flickered in and out of sight, mirage-like, but it grew steadily larger as he walked. The walking was endless, hours within seconds. Even the sun was obscured by the dust in the air, which was to assume there was a sun at all. The vague form loomed nearer each time he looked up, yet always there were miles left between himself and it. Then, in the space of a step, the distance was crossed. He had reached it, and it had resolved itself into the hulking wreck of a Star Destroyer.

Ben was dressed in his black First Order regalia. He had realized this somewhere along the way, paying it little mind at the time, but as he searched for an entrance to the corpse of the ship, the desert wind made itself known. It was a whisper across his cheek, and then a sharp tug at his cloak. It felt as if the wind itself had hands, long-fingered claws to pull and jerk him about. He staggered, taken off balance by its abruptness, and scrambled, ungainly, for the shelter of the derelict ship. The assault only ended when he was well within its hulls.

The ship had fallen nearly ninety degrees onto its side, transforming walls into floors and ceilings with doors above and below. He had to skirt around the edges of those that were open, or leap clean over them if the narrow way around was blocked. He didn't try to use the Force. He didn't think of it. It would occur to him after each opportunity had passed, and then slip his mind again. This was not his dream, but he was bound by its rules all the same.

There was a sound somewhere deeper in the ruin. He had noticed it slowly as the howl of the wind died down. Distorted though it was by the echo chambers of the ship, he thought he could discern the strains of a voice. The farther he delved into the sand-scored ruin, the clearer it became. When at last he could make out what it was, the revelation was a punch to his gut. It was a child's cry, helpless and uncontrolled, not loud, not the cry of someone who expected to be heard. It was the cry of someone who had no better option, and no hope. It was a sound of mourning.

The grief of it had Ben bracing himself with a hand on the hull, fighting to overcome the same hopelessness that held the child in its spell. In the act of catching his breath, head down, he saw the wall-turned-floor, and he saw the space where it fell away through an open door. In this chance happenstance that was likely not chance at all, he found the source of the sound. Huddled on her knees two rooms below him, trapped by the angle of the ship, was a scrawny little girl with her hair bound up in three sloppy buns.

Foolishly, unthinking, perhaps still compelled by the dream, Ben dropped himself down through the first door and then the second. Finding a way to climb back out didn't seem important. All that mattered was getting to Rey.

She gave no indication of noticing him when he jumped down, despite the echoing clank of his boots. Neither did she respond to her name when he called it. Only when he knelt and reached for her, when his fingers brushed her shoulder, did she turn and fling herself near-violently into his arms.

It was astonishing how neatly she fit into his lap, how small and warm she was, how he could conceal her away from the world just by wrapping his arms around her. She was still crying, muffled now against his chest, but the renewed fountain of tears and the way her hands dug into his clothing spoke of hope. Slowly, as he rubbed her back and rocked her and murmured sweet nothings into her ear—words stolen from memories of his own parents waking him from nightmares, "it's alright, sweetheart, I have you" —she grew still and quiet.

An immeasurable time later, this miniature version of Rey lifted her head and looked up at him, wearing her characteristic wrinkled nose of amusement. "Did you just call me sweetheart?"

Ben held her stare, daring her to complain. "I might have."

Suddenly she was not a child anymore, and she was kissing him. The air around them seemed to change with her, growing brighter and softer, shedding the ill heat of the desert. He realized belatedly that this was because their surroundings had transformed. There was grass beneath them, and small flowers, the sun filtering in dapples through a canopy of trees. Rey was laughing as she kissed him, exuding unabashed joy. It was infectious, and Ben fell back upon the cushion of grass and pulled her down with him, earning more laughter.

"Call me sweetheart again."

He almost rolled his eyes at the request, but he couldn't bring himself to tease her—not now. Her emotions were too high and pure. It would be a crime to dampen them. "Sweetheart."

She laughed again, outright giggled, and then showered his face with kisses. It was ridiculous and uplifting and he was startled to find himself laughing too, unable to stop until Rey did. She propped herself up with her elbows on his chest and looked down at him, alight with bliss. "This is our future."

"Is it?"

"It is."

He wasn’t sure if he could believe her wholeheartedly, but it was a pleasing thought. While the dream lasted, he indulged himself, not in the same faith that she had, but in the existence of the possibility.

.

In the morning, after a breakfast of flavorless grain mash, Luke challenged him to a duel. It was a mental exercise more than a physical one, very much reliant on the Force. Luke was no longer as agile as Rey, but every move had intent, and Ben was hard-pressed to surprise him.

Brell offered playful advice from the sidelines, which he ignored. When the match ended in a draw, she asked if she could have a go at Luke herself, and was soundly beaten. "I don't do swords," she excused herself, laughing. Luke acknowledged this with a bland smile and suggested they move on.

The rest of the day's training was a repeat of the day before, and Ben, having experience with Luke's teaching methods, expected the same in the days to come.

.

During their evening meal, Rey called over the comm. She could say little of her work, wary of the signal being tapped, but she expressed her affection and her confidence in Ben, and she thanked him for the dream. On his end, Ben struggled to say anything at all. As often was the case between them, words felt unnecessary. He would have preferred to communicate with touch and thought, and he had plans to, but their dreams did not coincide that night. Rey had warned him that she was no longer sleeping on Ahch-To's cycle. There nights would overlap only at the edges.

Ben resolved to take more naps.

.

She did not call again for several days. When they caught each other in dreams, it was fleeting and vague, both of them too lost on the edges of sleep to communicate easily. It was a comfort to hold and to touch, to feel each other for a few moments, but it taunted as much as it soothed.

The storms on Ahch-To came more frequently, he noticed, than they had when Rey was there. It was coincidence only, but it played to his loneliness. Rainstorms were nothing compared to the Force-storms he had suffered in his first few days without Snoke, but it was difficult to be grateful for that.

After one particularly thunderous night, Luke showed up at Ben's hut while he sat meditating, having gone most of the night without sleep. He could sense his uncle at the door, but opened his eyes only when something small and crinkly landed by his foot. It was another of the wrapped ration bars.

"Chewie wants your help with the Falcon."

For a disconnected second, he was inclined to point out that Rey was better with mechanics than he was. Rey, he remembered then, was not present to help, so there was no point in saying it. On the other hand, Luke could probably have done just as well, which meant...

Which meant that Chewbacca wanted to see Ben.

He unfolded his legs and stood up, taking the ration bar with him.

Chewie was underneath the Falcon, tuning up the landing gear, his fur mucky with rainwater and oil. He didn't turn when Ben approached, but growled at him to check the hyperdrive. Ben obeyed.

There was always something to clean or calibrate on the Millennium Falcon, and it had always been so. Chewie kept him busy with gruff, short requests, though Ben would have found enough to do on his own. Most of the work required careful handling but little thought, and it was impossible not to reminisce on the days he had spent doing this as a boy. Han would have shared the task of instruction with Chewie, voice oozing pride and affection for the one-of-a-kind ship. His absence stung acutely. Ben tried to banish it with thoughts of Rey, but that only served to conjure a memory of Han he had seen once in her mind. Midway through replacing a set of wires, his hands slowed, and then stopped. His gaze fell. He pulled in a breath that almost, almost shook.

He wanted to break something.

There was a pry bar in the storage hold. He had seen it while fetching tools. It would be easy to go and get it. He could take it to the cockpit first and smash the controls, wrench open the walls and tear out the cables. He could break the fuel lines, disable the engines. He could clench his fist and make the hull crack. He could peel the ship apart until no one would have a hope of repairing it and he would never have to touch it, never look at it again.

He exhaled.

He went back to replacing wires.

It was midday and Ben's stomach was growling when Chewie called it quits. There was more to be done—there was always more—but the remainder was trivial. Chewbacca stood on the grassy flat, arms crossed, taking in the gray hulk of the ship. Ben tried to look past it. Eventually, Chewie grumbled a thank-you.


	12. Would You Meet Me In The Halfway Place

On the seventeenth day without Rey, a ship broke atmo. It was a small transport, blocky and inelegant, with engines that looked too big for its compact size. It circled the island once, perhaps deciding on a landing place. It had more options than the larger Falcon, or Leia's Mirrorbright, but in the end it chose the their field all the same. Luke went out to greet it and Ben followed, if only because it was better than waiting behind for news.

Rey was not on the ship. He knew that much before it landed. He would have sensed her the moment she entered orbit, if not sooner. It was a Resistance soldier who emerged instead—a bothan, head held high and fur neatly trimmed, an assault rifle held at ease against his chest. From the foot of the boarding ramp he surveyed the island's tenants, pinching his nostrils at their rugged state. When his studious gaze reached Ben, it stopped. "Ben Solo," he pronounced, and the hairs on the back of Ben's neck stood up. "You are being given temporary leave from your exile on the condition that you lend your assistance in the death or capture of one of your former First Order allies, at which time your exile will be reinstated."

Ben blinked, then furrowed his brow, going back over the recital in his head. They wanted to pull him off his island prison to help clean up the mess he'd made, and then simply throw him back? Was this the best his mother could do? "Who is the target?" He growled the question, feeling offended that all they wanted him for was assassin work—and then, when he thought it over again, feeling amused.

"Kill or capture," the soldier corrected. "The target is suspected to be a Knight of Ren. His name is unknown."

That was impossible. The knights were all accounted for. Rey had killed the last one. "Who says he's a knight? Why?"

The bothan didn't twitch at Ben's intensity. His demeanor was impeccably steady and professional, if overly stiff. "There have been indications of Force ability."

"What indications?"

"You will be briefed in detail when we arrive on Rulah."

"What's your name?" Ben tried a different angle.

"Captain Tel'syiel."

"Captain Tel'syiel," he repeated it, pressing false confidence into his voice. "Why do they want me?"

"To catch a wild kathhound, use a tamed one,” the captain answered, snide.

Ben made an exercise of keeping his face blank. "Is this on General Organa's orders?"

"The council made the decision. If the General had any sway on it, that information has not been made public."

Ben couldn't tell if the bothan was bristling with annoyance or if it was just the wind. His instinct was to assume the worst. In doing so, he was less likely to show weakness. "Let's go."

"Not yet." It was Luke who spoke, using another of those voices that Han had named. This one was his Jedi Master tone, at once calming and commanding. "My ward will need a weapon to fulfill this assignment."

The bothan tilted his snout up, but didn't argue with the statement.

"We will need time to go and retrieve it. You're free to accompany us if you have any doubts."

This time the bothan's fur definitely puffed itself out. The suggestion that he would doubt Luke Skywalker was apparently a deep insult, never mind that Ben could sense it was exactly the case. Bothans had a reputation for being fussy about loyalties and social appearances. Theirs was a culture that made Ben almost miss the Republic's political shenanigans. "I will wait here," Tel'syiel said stiffly.

"I'll wait with him," Brell chimed in, sounding too cheerful about the whole thing. "I can fill him in on the exile's progress." She looked rather like she just wanted to make the stuffy captain uncomfortable. She and Classen had both grown protective over Ben, moreso than was strictly necessary for their professional position. It was a strange thing to have people outside of his family who would fight for him. It left a tingling in his gut that he wasn't sure whether he liked or not.

When he, Luke, and Classen were far enough from the shuttle to go unheard, Ben asked, "It will take a while for me to build a new lightsaber. Will he wait?"

"You're not building a new lightsaber," Luke said serenely.

"I hope you don't expect me to fight with a wooden sword." Unless he had missed some secret armory, the island was not exactly well-equipped.

To that, Luke smiled. "Come with me. You'll like this."

It failed to dawn on him what Luke was getting at until they stopped before Luke's own hut. He had an inkling then, but he was reluctant to believe it.

As persistent as his doubts held on in spite of every step, it felt like walking through a dream. They were in the back of the two-chambered hut then, and there was a box on a table. Luke stood in such a way that obscured the box from Ben's sight, but Ben heard the click and the creak as it opened. Ben heard metal clack on metal. Then Luke turned around with Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber held in his mechanical hand, and held it out.

Ben hesitated.

Perhaps the poor lighting in the hut was playing tricks on his eyes, but for a fraction of a second it seemed there was a figure beside Luke, outlined in light, and its hand also rested on the lightsaber.

"It still belongs to you."

Ben breathed in slowly, breathed out, and took the weapon. Without ceremony, he hooked it to his belt.

.

Classen and Brell were going with him, but Luke and Chewbacca were not.

"Someone has to tend the garden," Luke excused, and Chewbacca added a grumble to the effect of "take care of yourself." It touched him perhaps more than the gift of the lightsaber had.

As the transport lifted off, rattling its way through the atmosphere, Ben closed his eyes. If he reached for it, he could feel the pull of the energy around him as he was carried farther and farther from the Force-rich island. It had attuned itself to him in those strange few strange months he had called it home. Those months felt more like years. That short time during which he had lived without Snoke—for the first time in his life—felt like a lifespan all its own.

The old Rebel Alliance had been fond of a mythological creature, a bird that burned to death and renewed itself from its own ashes. Ben could have been that creature, burned to ash in the firestorm of Snoke's fall only to emerge like a newborn, fragile and ungainly, raw to the intensity of the world. His prison cell had been his egg, all windowless walls and stifling closeness. Ahch-To had been his nest, a place to convalesce after the trial of rebirth. Now he had grown sure-footed, had grown a tougher hide, and like a fledgling bird, he'd been ejected from the nest. The time for coddling was over. He would fly under his own power, or he would fall.

The ship was built for durability, not speed, and the trip was a long one. Rulah, according to Tel'syiel, was a barren ringed planet in the Mid Rim. Its sun put off unfortunately high levels of radiation, which the planet's atmosphere could not sufficiently deter, but enterprising pirates and smugglers had built into the cliffs and cave systems during the Empire's reign, and the Resistance had repurposed one of the larger of these establishments. The use of it now, on the tail end of the war, was due to its closeness to where the First Order was making a last stand.

Ben spent most of the voyage meditating. His desire was to reach out to Rey, to tell her that he was on his way, but he resisted. He would see her soon enough. He focused instead on grounding and centering, building up his mental walls and reminding himself of who he was, of what he wanted and what he would have to do—or not do—to fulfill those wants. Much of that was vague still, but it was more than what it had been before. He had purpose.

Tel'syiel interacted with him as little as possible, choosing to stay in the cockpit even while they were in hyperspace. Brell commented sardonically on her surprise that the captain wasn't watching Ben himself, as twitchy as he seemed, to which Classen pointed out the camera node in the ceiling.

The rings of Rulah were the deep red of clotted blood, complimenting the bruise color of the planet below. Just looking at it put a sour taste in one's mouth, or so Brell griped. Ben hadn't noticed, and he could not have cared less. Rey was down there.

As the ship began its descent, Brell and Classen stiffened and stood up straighter. Ben noted, as one who had trained teams of warriors himself, how it happened spontaneously, reflexively, without so much as a glance passed between them. He was anticipating it and watching her already when Brell spoke up.

"This is an active Resistance base and people know your face. We'll try to get you somewhere secure as fast as possible, but I'd recommend keeping your head down."

As inclined as he was to barrel headfirst through the base until he found Rey, she made an annoying amount sense. He didn't know how subtle they could be if the whole base already knew he was coming, but he decided it wise to let his guards do their job, at least for now.

For all of that, they were still reliant on Captain Tel'syiel to navigate the base for them, and it was clear which side of the fence he fell on in regard to Ben.

It didn't matter. The first step was getting to Rey, preferably without causing a scene that might prevent him from staying by her side. He wouldn't worry about the rest until that goal was accomplished.

There proved to be a complication to that, and it only became apparent as the modified cliff wall came into view. Rey was on the planet, yes, but she was not in the base. She was no where near it.

The hangar was dug into the base of the cliff, shallow but long. In an emergency, almost every ship docked there would be able to take off at once, rather than waiting for others to move out of the way. Set at intervals along the back wall of the hangar were doors, large and small, leading into the rest of the base.

As the transport touched down and the ramp hissed open, Brell and Classen took up positions on either side of Ben, and a half-step behind. Captain Tel'syiel took the lead. They made the short walk through the hangar in this formation without attracting undue attention. Then there was a lobby, sparsely populated, its walls a hybrid of plasteel and carved-out stone. A security guard met them midway across, and Tel'syiel engaged zher in a brief and muttered exchange. Zhe cast a critical eye on Ben, but said nothing to him, merely waved the group on their way.

Next, there was an elevator, industrial-looking and clearly the subject of recent repairs. Forced to stand still as it made its slow descent, Ben found himself on his last thread of patience. While Rey's Force signature was still far off, Leia's was below, and he was nearly grinding his teeth to dust with the need to question her.

At last, the elevator opened on a hallway, this one crowded, and though a dozen heads turned his way, Ben passed without caring. His mother was on this floor. He had reached out to touch her with the Force, and she him. There was a contradiction of warmth and tension in that touch, weighted by their unresolved reconciliation, but it went ignored. This was business.

When Tel'syiel stopped at a nondescript door and raised his hand to knock, Ben stormed past him. The room was a makeshift office, as unassuming as the door. There was a table with a caf maker, a few uncomfortable looking chairs, and the desk where Leia sat with her hands in her lap, waiting.

A sense of danger flared behind his eyes, then died. Brell and Classen stumbled through the door behind him, each of them gripping one of Tel'syiel's shoulders. The bothan had his hands on his blaster and fire in his eyes, and it occurred to Ben that forcing his way into the General's office might have given the wrong impression. He wasn't in the mood to feel apologetic for it, though. The situation was under control and Leia was still waiting for him to speak. "Where's Rey?"

"Scouting."

"Scouting?" Tel'syiel tried to jerk free in response to Ben's raised voice, but Classen and Brell held on firmly.

"For the knight," she clarified. "Her abilities give her an advantage."

"He's not a knight. They're dead."

"Then what is he?"

"I need more information.” It was all he could do not to bare his teeth at her like an animal.

"Sit down."

It was an outrageous suggestion. Even had he been planning to stay long, he wouldn't have been able to sit still. "I thought the planet was unsafe."

"We have radiation vaccines."

"Let me go after her."

She held his gaze unblinking, and was apparently satisfied with what she saw. "Captain Tel'syiel, escort Solo to the medbay for his injection, then authorize him a Sunray. Lieutenant Classen, accompany them. You take orders from Solo unless he's being an idiot. I trust your judgment on that one. Lieutenant Brell, stay with me for debriefing."

Tel'syiel's fur was rippling with rage. "General, I protest..."

"I gave you an order, Captain," said the General, clipped and formal. "File your complaint later."

Ben wondered if bothans were vulnerable to aneurysms. Tel'syiel looked like he might keel over. He did not, but his "yes, ma'am" sounded like it hurt his throat. He said not a word to Ben.

Back through the hall full of wary eyes they went, back to the elevator and up to the same lobby they had traversed once already. From there it was farther back into the cliffside, through a short, wide hallway and into a wider medical center. It looked well-stocked and well-manned. The adequacy and convenience of care for injured soldiers was a good indicator of a leader's priorities. Ben should not have been surprised.

A twilek in scrubs saw them and approached. "Here for your shots?"

Tel’syiel stepped to the side and jerked a hand in Ben's direction. "They are."

If the twilek recognized the face of the First Order’s former pet monster, he kept it to himself. "Human?"

Ben nodded. The nurse waited until Classen had given confirmation as well.

"Right this way."

Ben made further observations on the medbay as they passed through it. Despite the air of steady work, it was not overly crowded. There were pallets and a few raised beds along the walls, with patients in various states of recovery, but the climate of the place was not one of emergency. The siege against the First Order was a long and steady press, as Rey had explained. There was rhythm and routine in such warfare, and rarely a great number of casualties in a day except unless something changed.

"You fellas new to the base?" asked the twilek, setting a red plasteel box on a table and flicking open the latches. Inside was a med dispenser and several replaceable cartridges.

"They are," Tel'syiel said again, tightly.

"Right. We try not to be out on the surface at all, but if you gotta, this stuff will last you about two standard cycles. No long-term radiation effects, but if you're out there for more than twenty minutes with bare skin, you'll prolly get a sunburn." He paused to take another look at Ben, more critical this time. "... Definitely. You'll definitely get a sunburn."

Classen snickered, and when Ben shot him a look, he said, "he means you're white as the snow on Hoth."

"So are you," said the twilek, whose skin was midnight blue. Classen shrugged.

The vaccine was painless, leaving a cool, buzzing sensation as it diffused through the pores of his skin. Classen was done next and the nurse sanitized and packed away the dispenser. "You're good to go. Come back in two days if you need more."

Ben didn't plan on it. His intention was to have this done with in one fel swoop.

Back again they went to the hangar, and along the exhaustive stretch of the back wall until they came to a section where five small fighters were parked together, with a telling empty space for a sixth. They were shaped like miniaturized Skipray Blastboats, more compact than an X-Wing, but with a larger interior. They would make a convenient option for planetside travel where a speeder wasn't fast enough.

Ben squinted into the cockpit of the nearest. It had seats for two, with a shallow space in the back for sleep or storage. He weighed the possibilities and didn't like his conclusion. "Classen, stay here."

"What?!" It was Tel'syiel who responded, fur puffing up like an angry Loth-cat. "And leave you to escape?"

"I'm not escaping," Ben said, finding himself in a rare state of calm now that he was back in a warzone. "I'm going to get Rey."

Tel'syiel's teeth were bared and his ears flat against his skull. Before he could compose another verbal complaint, however, Classen stepped in.

"Sorry, boss, but I'm filing this under 'being an idiot'. You might need back-up."

"If I have to bring Rey back and whoever she's hunting," Ben countered, "there won't be room."

"Then leave me behind. I won't die of radiation poisoning." He patted the spot on his arm where the vaccine had been administered. Ben's mouth was already open to keep arguing, but the offer caught him off guard. It touched him. He had to make an effort to keep it from showing. Classen had been a companion day in and day out for months, Ben acknowledged to himself, and somehow did not seem to begrudge the circumstances. It was... nice to have someone who knew and respected his priorities and who was willing to accommodate them. It was not something he was accustomed to.

"Get in."

"Wait." It was Tel'syiel again, but his tone was subdued. He unclasped a small, round device from his belt and handed it to Classen. "Short-range communicator. It will connect you to the base. Call if you have any trouble." He gestured with a twitch of his snout at Ben, making it clear where he expected that trouble to come from. It was a useful offer all the same.

Classen took the comm with a quick salute and climbed into the gunner's seat. Ben barely waited for him to be out of the way before vaulting in after. The last time he had been in this position, Snoke was still alive. To have his hands on the control panel gave him a startling surge of confidence. He relished the weight of each switch and toggle as he powered up the little fighter, breathing in with the rising whir of the engine, feeling it come alive like a waking animal. His blood sang. He had been afraid of freedom, had wanted—had needed someone else to choose his way for him. In the long run, he still did, but this was different. This moment was an exception. He knew what he wanted to do and where he needed to go. He was not afraid. He was driven.

"Can't you just ask Rey what she's doing?" Classen wondered after the Sunray had navigated the hangar's low opening and was rising above the cliffs. "You two... talk in each other's heads, right?"

"She's concentrating." Ben had been testing their thread since realizing that she was not at the base, but had come up against a closed door. He could have knocked, or simply pushed the door open if he tried, but... "I don't want to distract her." There was a sense of danger there, not life-threatening yet, but with the potential to be. "She's doing something with the Force," he mused, trying to make sense of it while keeping half of his attention on flying. "Distorting it. I think she's trying to hide." He could sense another signature too, but it was vague. It seemed to flicker in and out, or jump from place to place. Comparing the feel of the two, the way each resonated, he thought that Rey's would have been doing the same if he were not linked so permanently to her. It was a clever technique if one were trying to hide from another Force user, or to sneak up on them. He wondered if Luke had taught it to her or if she were simply mimicking her target. He had never seen her use the technique before, or anything like it, but he knew first-hand how quickly she could learn. It made him grin as he pressed the craft to faster speeds over the jagged terrain. She was a marvel, his beloved.

Despite the harsh climate, Rulah's surface was not entirely lifeless. There were plants, or something like them—slimey, thick-skinned vines that grew in arches from between the rocks, likely taking most of their nutrients from underground with only their most protected parts exposed to the deadly sunlight. Some of them grew enormous, thick as tree trunks and arching high as buildings, the same ugly mottle of purple and yellow as the dirt they grew out of.

Ben brought the Sunray low over a particularly thick tangle of flora, and just as he left that he was getting close, the mental door slammed open. Rey didn't bother with words. She blasted her location at him in a wash of anger and desperation. There was no way her target hadn't sensed it too, which meant they were either in confrontation at that moment or he was fleeing. Ben wheeled the fighter downward, landed roughly, and left it running as he heaved himself overboard. Rey wasn't in sight, but she was close—so close. "Stay with the ship."

"Still idiotic," Classen responded, and followed him down.

Ben didn't have time to argue. He could sense more than Rey's emotions now that she had opened the link wide. He could feel pain, physical and throbbing. She was injured.

He was going to kill the fool who'd done it.

When he found her amid the jungle of vines, he was momentarily bewildered by what he saw. She had taken the warning of sunburn seriously and covered herself from head to toe. Under long sleeves were gloves and wrist bindings. Hiding her face, a hood, cowl, and goggles. It was a phantasmal appearance, due in part to the fabric all being white or pale grey. The look was marred only by the dark blood soaking through at her thigh, brighter where it streaked down her leg and flecked the hand she must have touched it with.

She was in profile from where he stood, and she did not look at him as he ran to her. "He's getting away!" She lurched forward, wobbled, grit her teeth and kept going. Ben halted her with a hand on her shoulder, only to have her twist away from him. The Force was almost a physical barrier around her, pulsing with her fury. She was wild-eyed and single-mindedly set on running down her prey, or bleeding to death in the attempt. He grabbed her again and pointed upward.

"It's too late."

The shuttle must have been hidden just over the nearest ridge. Now it mocked them, glittering in the sun as it blasted starward. Rey tensed, just for a moment, as if to give chase anyway, but there was nothing for it. The tiny craft would be out of range before they could get Ben's Sunray off the ground.

Defeated, she let out a slow breath and sat down, craning over her injured leg.

"Let's go back to the base." They could treat her there. Without the distraction of the chase, all of her awareness was on the wound and Ben could feel it as if it were his own.

"Just a minute." She had torn open her pantleg to better see it—a blaster shot that had just grazed her, not as deep as a direct hit would have been, but wider, blackened around the edges and bright red where her movement had broken the thin cauterization. It was still bleeding steadily. For this, she pulled off one of her gloves and began unwinding the strip of cloth from that wrist, precise and efficient in the motion. When it was free, she bound that over the wound, tight enough to slow the bleeding but not to cut off circulation to the rest of the limb. She carried out the whole process deftly, without a flinch, though Ben had to grit his teeth against what came over the bond. She had clearly done this before.

He waited until she began to stand on her own, then scooped her up into his arms. It earned him a squack of alarm, which he ignored in favor of trying not to drop her as she flailed.

 _"Ben!_ I can walk!"

"You shouldn't."

She growled— _growled_ —in frustration, but she settled down. "Fine, but my ship's the other way."

"We'll take mine."

"I'll call someone to pick up your ship, Rey." Classen was already taking out and activating the comm unit Tel'syiel had given him.

"Thanks." She sounded more grumpy than grateful, but she was relaxing already into Ben's arms. He had to fight himself not to smile. Cradled as she was against his chest, he felt it when her heartbeat matched itself to his.

Too soon, he reached the softly rumbling Sunray and Rey squirmed out of his hold, making as if to climb into the pilot's seat.

"No." Ben stopped her with a hand on her arm, and when she stared at him from behind her bug-eyed goggles, he gestured at the sleeping space in the back of the cockpit. "Lie down."

"I'm not _dying_. You lie down."

He was not in the mood to follow orders. "Now, Rey. We have to go."

She stopped arguing. He expected at least an angry huff, but she swallowed even that and obeyed—or near enough. Rather than lying down, she sat with her back against the hull and her legs stretched out, pressing a hand to the bandage but showing only hard-edged alertness on her face.

Classen, prudently not saying a word, reclaimed his seat and Ben once again took the controls.

As the Sunray lifted back into the air, weightless as a leaf in a storm, his heart soared with it. Their enemy's escape mattered not to him. He would rectify it. Even Rey's injury didn't matter, for the moment. Her own feelings on it were of annoyance, not fear, and it would soon be healed. All that mattered was that she was there with him, and they were flying.

He had only one memory of finding such joy in flying before. It had been as a child, the first time his father let him take the Falcon up. Snoke was in his head even then, whispering doubts and casting lures, but for that moment, in the light of his father's pride, Ben had been able to ignore it.

There was no Snoke now to dampen his mood or stifle his spirit. There were other things, his status as a war criminal and his exile being the most inconvenient, but it was trivial compared to what he had overcome.

Rey was resting with her eyes closed. He didn't have to look to know this, and wouldn't have been able to tell through the goggles in any case. Through the Force, they were wrapped up around each other more completely than any physical act could replicate. He felt what she felt, knew her thoughts as well as his own, as she did his. They were flying the Sunray together, her skill working through his hands. It was too easy to lose himself in it, the sensation of acting as a single entity, two minds and one purpose. Almost before he realized it, they were over the cliffside base, then swooping down and sliding elegantly into the hangar, flawlessly taking their ship’s place among the other Sunrays.

Captain Tel'syiel was waiting for them, and he had organized back-up in their absence. He was marching toward them even as the Sunray settled, puffing out his chest and plainly meaning to take charge, but it was Classen who once again came to Ben's rescue.

"Rey's hurt. Help us get her to medbay."

Tel'syiel opened and closed his mouth, looking a bit like a nerf chewing its cud, but the two officers behind him jumped to work. Rey didn't complain about the assistance this time, unlike Ben, the officers let her walk with only the support of her arms around their shoulders. Ben was sorely tempted to pick her up again just to get her there faster, but Rey made it clear, in the privacy of their bond, that she would suffer no such indignity.

He had acknowledged already his mother's wisdom in the easily accessible placement of the medical center. Now he was grateful for it.

A table was sanitized by the first medic who saw them enter, who then beckoned to them and moved to help. As Ben and Classen were shunted off to the side, Rey sat down with her legs hanging over the edge. She was immediately bullied into lying on her back, and though she didn't argue, she visibly sulked. Ben hadn't known until then how much she disliked being taken care of. He would have expected the opposite, given her history of abandonment.

In his head, without words, she showed him how she had treated her injuries alone in the desert, even when she had a choice. Too many were desperate on Jakku, and desperate people would take advantage of those more desperate than themselves. It was better not to owe favors—better not to show weakness.

Ben would have agreed with her in the past. Now things were different. Now he would have taken on any debt, confessed to any weakness if doing so would somehow benefit Rey... or even his mother, or Luke. Neither his life nor his public image were worth as much as theirs.

Rey didn't like that train of thought. On the table, she sighed and pulled off her cowl and goggles, turning her head to meet his eyes. It was the first time he had seen her face since reuniting with her. It took a great deal of effort not to push past the busy medic and kiss her.

Rey smiled at that.

And yet, when she was patched up and had a sufficient dose of painkillers in her system, when she was allowed to stand and to approach him, Ben didn't know where to start. He sat on the low, narrow bench against the wall where he had sat throughout her treatment. He sat because he had focused so hard on keeping himself seated that he couldn't quite remember how to stand up. It was left to Rey to rouse him, and she took her time. She reached down to touch his cheek, traced the line of the scar with a fingertip, curled her knuckles under his chin and tilted his face up to better see him. She coaxed a smile from him by simply wishing for it, and then she bent down to kiss him, once on the cheek where the scar dimpled it, and once on the mouth.


	13. With One Lone Candle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If part of this looks familiar, it's because I posted one scene from this chapter on tumblr. It was after that and a few similar snippets that I decided to put those ideas together into a larger story.

Once Rey and Ben had been satisfied, for the moment, with their reunion and willing to pay regard to anyone outside of each other, they were ushered from the medbay and back to Leia's office to make their report. Rey did most of the talking, as she had been the one to engage with the enemy, and from her telling, Ben was able to answer part of the mystery.

"Nya Kraes. He was an assassin hired off and on by Snoke. Not trained by him. I never saw him use the Force. I didn't sense it in him. He hides it well..." He would not have believed such a thing could be kept secret—not from him—but he had seen the game of masking and distortion that Rey and the assassin had played with each other. When asked, Rey confirmed that she had only been copying her opponent.

Leia folded her hands on her desk and leaned forward. "How do you suggest we stop him?"

"He'll come back," Ben told her. "We'll be ready."

.

The quarters assigned to Rey were small, but comfortably furnished. Ben hadn't put much thought into it, but he realized after the matter was settled that he had expected to be kept in a cell. He had not anticipated the luxury of being allowed—even expected—to follow Rey to her bed. There were two guards on the door, in compromise, but one was Brell, and he found himself trusting her and Classen considerably more after Classen's displays of dedication.

The second-best part of Rey's room was the bed, which took up nearly half the space. The best part of the room was the adjacent fresher. It wasn't much bigger than the one on the Falcon, with the same simple sonic shower, but it was nice not to have to walk across a rain-soaked field to get to it. Each of them took a turn washing up. Rey had made implications of a desire to squeeze in with him, insisting that she was an expert at fitting into small places, but Ben had, with a smile, suggested that she take it easy.  
  
On his turn, Ben found a stack of fresh clothes waiting for him, arranged in advance of his coming. There were sturdy gray trousers and a jacket, with a thin white shirt suited for the warmer climate of Rulah. He ignored the jacket for now, straightening the shirt’s collar and indulging, just for a moment, in examining himself in the narrow wall-hung mirror.

It was a face he almost didn't recognize. Perhaps it was an effect of the lighting of the room, but there seemed to be more color in his cheeks than he remembered, and the shadows under his eyes were barely there. The oddity of it made him smile again, and that was a stranger thing still.

At some point during his shower, there had been an addition to the furniture in the room—a small, fold-out table and two matching chairs. Rey was sitting already, eyeing a tray of food. Its twin sat across from her, waiting for him.

She grinned immensely when he emerged. "Come eat."

He took his place at the table. It was strange to sit in a chair at mealtime rather than on the dirt floor of an Ahch-to hut. "You didn't have to wait for me."

"I didn't." She waved a small piece of something at him, then stuffed it in her mouth.

On closer observation, he noticed the slice of bread on his tray that was absent from hers, already devoured. It seemed a natural thing to tear his slice in half and share it, since she so clearly liked the stuff, and it was a pleasure to watch the way her eyes lit up at the offer. "How's your leg?"

"Feels fine," she said around a mouthful. "Thanks for the rescue."

"I should have come sooner. We might have caught him."

"He'll come back, like you said. We just can't let him hurt anyone else."

He let the shop talk die. He wasn't really in the mood for it. Being with her, being off Ahch-To, he felt uplifted, regardless of the circumstances that brought him here. Their humble meal in her cramped quarters was a celebration. The morning would bring trouble and complication, but for now, for this evening, he was content. He was comfortable in his own skin. It was a bewildering and somehow amusing discovery.

Rey finished her meal before him, wiped her hands on her pants like the feral thing she was, folded up her chair, plopped herself onto the well-cushioned bed...

And bounced.

Ben stared at her, but she didn't look like she planned to stop. "Your leg."

"It's fine. I can't feel it." Her words were short, clipped by her springy motion, and a little too loud. She had her legs folded under her and her hands fisted on the mattress for balance, propelling herself up and down the way Ben would have done when he was six.

He had absolutely no idea what to do about this.

“What?” She sounded defensive, though he hadn't said anything. “Not everyone grew up with bouncy beds.”

Ben felt another smile creeping up on him and tried to wrestle it down. It was a losing battle. "So you're making up for lost time?"

She grinned and kept bouncing. “When’s the last time you bounced on a bed?”

He didn’t have to think hard to come up with the answer. “I have no idea.”

He realized his mistake too late. She had stopped bouncing and was holding out a hand, beckoning. He gave her a wide-eyed, doubtful look, but the hand didn’t waver. If he dawdled much longer, he thought she might order him.

She picked up that thought and sent him a flirtatious sense of amusement across the bond. In the end, she didn't have to say anything. He resigned himself to acting foolish, if only to make her laugh. He would play along, for her... but that didn't mean he had to make it easy.

Ignoring her offered hand, he sat down on the edge of the bed and let it bounce a little under his weight, adding a beleaguered sigh to complete the picture.

Rey gave him the flattest look he had ever seen in his life. “What was that? You call that bouncing?” She bounced herself again as if he needed the demonstration. “Get on your knees like this. It works better.”

Ben sighed again and bent to strip off his boots while Rey watched in victoriously. He dragged it out as long as he could, playing up his reluctance for the sake of the show. When he had no more excuses left, he pulled his legs up onto the bed and looked at her as if it pained him.

“Now bounce!” She emphasized the command by doing just that, over and over again. She was shaking the bed enough to make holding still more difficult than bouncing along with her, so he held his breath and complied.

If he was smiling when Rey let him stop, it was only because her own joy was so infectious. It had nothing to do with the childish act—not in the least.

“There, was that so bad?”

“Terrible.” He smirked. “What do you have in mind next? Should we play hide and seek?”

“I’d win. You’re too big to fit into the good hiding spots.” She was probably not just making assumptions. Her comment about the shower aside, he had noticed the way she examined every corner of every space she entered—his desert scavenger, primped and polished and trained to fit in, but still a creature of the wilderness.

While he drifted in his moment of poetic reverie, she rolled over and put her head in his lap. His heart puffed up at the contact, light and pleasantly smothering, like a ball of cotton stuffed between his ribs. He indulged in stroking her temples, catching and playing with a curl of lark-brown hair. “I’m out of ideas, then.”

Rey’s eyes had fluttered shut at the touch, her body relaxing. “This is fine.” She let him play with her hair for a few breaths in silence, and then said, "today was kind of fun."

"You could have died."

"Besides that part."

"Isn't this what you've been doing since you left?"

"Yeah, but not with you."

He enjoyed himself much more when she was around, but he hadn't realized it was mutual. Rey had so many people who adored her. He had trouble imagining what that felt like. Rather than giving voice to those thoughts, he admonished, "it isn't very Jedi-like to enjoy a fight.”

"I'm not a Jedi." He could feel what she felt as she lay there. He could feel the warmth that pooled like liquid and sparked like fire, igniting a candle-flame of desire. She snaked her arm around his middle, dragging her fingers over his ribs on the way. The contact made him twitch.

Rey stilled. Her eyes narrowed.

Ben felt a sinking, foreboding feeling in the pit of his stomach. He suspected it was a warning from the Force that his lover had just learned a deadly secret.

Rey crooked two fingers between his ribs and wiggled them. Ben made an embarrassing noise in his throat and shoved her off, but she rolled with it, coming up on her hands and knees, elbows bent, looking unnervingly like a nexu ready to pounce. He was caught so off balance that he couldn’t think of a word of protest. Their eyes met, Rey tensed, he braced himself, and she tackled him. He caught her at the shoulders, but her wily hands still made it under his guard, digging without mercy into his ticklish sides.

Ben was _not_ laughing. He was not. It was an involuntary vocal reaction and it was entirely unfair. He doubled over on top of Rey, tried again to get a grip on her and to pull her off, but she had found her advantage and was not letting go. His sides hurt and he was wheezing and he had not been tickled since he was a little boy. He was half-certain that he had forgotten what it felt like.

“Rey, no! Ah! Damnit Rey, stop, I'm begging you, Rey, _please!_ "

She stopped. She wriggled out from under him and sat up, flushed and grinning. “You’re ticklish!”

He glared back at her, scandalized. “I am not.”

“Did the First Order know you were ticklish?” She was far too excited about this.

“No.”

“Is that why you wore that huge, wide belt?”

“No.”

“Does your _mother_ know you’re ticklish?”

Ben sighed and ran a hand over his face. His cheeks felt hot and sore from laughing. “She’s my mother. She probably discovered it first.”

“Does Luke know?”

He could have rolled his eyes at her persistence. “ _Yes,_ ” he growled, and then he snagged her by her uninjured leg and pulled, landing her on her back. He pinned her down with a hand on her sternum and dug the other into her ribs, twitching his fingers.

Nothing.

He glowered and tried her neck instead. All it earned was an owlish blink. There might have been a little tightness at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t tell me you’re not ticklish.”

That tightness turned into a smirk. “I’m not ticklish.”

He traced his fingers up behind her ear and still earned only smug impassiveness. With another exasperated sigh, he gave up. “As usual, you're stronger than I am.”

She beamed at him, bright-eyed and mussed and making his heart skip. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep your secret safe.”

Ben let himself slump over her in defeat, dropping his head to her shoulder and breathing deep. He felt her own breath catch, and nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck. Her arms came around him, hands moving with intent, but not to tickle.

Slyly, just to get back at her, he retreated. "I told you to rest."

Rey snorted, caught him by the shirt, and pulled him back down for a kiss.

.

He was not sure, at first, what woke him. There was a nagging uneasiness in the back of his mind, but so often was the case after his dreams, he paid it no mind. If it was something important, it would make itself clear.

Rey was stirring beside him, likely roused by his waking, and the air around her looked strange. Underground as they were, there was none of the natural light he had grown used to. Their only illumination was a strip of blue along the floor, marking the exit and the door to the fresher. It seemed to Ben, in a moment of sleep-haze, as if he were seeing Rey from underwater.

"Any nightmares?" She leaned over him, a smile hinted at the corner of her lips. She was warm and soft and made his heart ache.

"One." He touched her face, slid his fingers under the fall of her hair.

"Tell me about it."

"We had four children." He concentrated on keeping a straight face. " You taught them to tickle me. It was horrible."

Rey grinned, almost laughed. "Was it a vision?"

"Oh stars, I hope not."

She seemed to be trying to stifle her smile, but if so, she was not succeeding. "I think I'd like having four kids. It'd be nice to have a family."

He hadn't thought of it that way. Was that what Rey wanted? Children and a domestic life? He would give that to her, if she so desired. He would give her anything, but the thought was daunting. Dying for her would be easier. "I..."  
  
That subtle feeling that had woke him suddenly flared to life. By the look on Rey's face, she felt it too. Ben's convolescence on Ahch-To had not completely dulled his edge, and with battlefield efficiency, they were both out of bed and dressed, double-checking lightsabers at belts before bolting through the door.

The guards were already at attention, having heard the commotion inside. The new one stepped into Ben's path, puffing himself up before Brell could take charge. "What's going on?"

"Leia's in danger."

That was enough to give the young man pause. Rey took it as permission to go, and Ben stayed close at her heels, brushing past an aborted attempt to block him. A short, sharp correction from Brell sorted the matter out, and both guards fell into step.

The elevator was deactivated.

Rey slammed the button again, then tried to pry the door open with her fingers. When that failed, she stepped back and held up a clawed hand, gathering the Force around her, but before she could rip herself an opening by sheer willpower, the new guard made himself useful.

"Back the other way. There's a stair."

It was plainly a less-used part of the base. There was no paneling to smooth out the walls, only raw cut stone, corkscrewing down through the innards of the cliff. It seemed an odd inclusion, but logical, given the history of the structure.

At the top of the stair, as she was bracing herself to barrel downward, Ben caught Rey’s arm. "That trick," he said, all but slurring the words in his rush to get them out. "What you did with the Force. Do it now. Don't let him know we're coming."

Rey closed her eyes, just briefly, and centered herself. This time, as close to her and keyed up as he was, Ben could sense how she did it. It was like meditating, like reaching out along the ley lines of the Force, only she did it in multiple directions, one after the other, leaving shadows of herself in every place she touched. She could not keep them all even and steady, but that aided the effect, each trace of her pulsing in and out like a voice that echoed until you could not discern its source. She might have been in their room or in the lobby or in the sky above the cliff. Ben would have to practice before he could mimic the effect, but with any luck, Rey was creating enough of a distraction that his own Force presence would go unnoticed.

Either way, it wouldn't matter for long. Leia and the impending sense of disaster were only two levels below.

Nya Kraes was at the far end of the hall, dressed in a Resistance fighter's uniform. He fired a volley of blaster shots when Rey and Ben burst from the stairwell. He barely took the time to look at them, let alone aim. An ordinary soldier would have missed, but his shots were Force-guided. Rey caught them on the twin blades of her lightsaber, but each one would have been fatal had it gotten through. From behind her guard, Ben raised a hand to retaliate, and the assassin made a dive through the nearest door.

Leia was inside, lighting the currents of the Force like a moon on water—like the song she had named her ship for—mirror bright.

The assassin was with Ben's mother.

It was as if his feet were carried on wings of the Force. Crossing the long hallway took no time at all. Rey failed to keep pace, but he could feel her following. He was through the open door in a heartbeat and flinging out a hand to freeze Nya Kraes where he stood. Rey's footsteps pounded behind him, and then she was leaping over him, bringing her saber down in a sunbright arc to end it.

Leia was on the floor.

She had fallen facedown, halfway between her bed and a shelf with a blaster on it. Ben rushed to her side and went down to his knees, searching for signs of life and injury.

Breathing. Alive. Stunned. Not unconscious.

She stirred when he touched her and Ben all but choked on his relief. " _Mom._ "

Slowly, a few inches at a time, Leia sat up, one hand pressed tight to a blaster burn on her shoulder. "Oh," she said, a little breathless. "I haven't heard that one in a while."

The noise Rey made from behind him might, under better circumstances, have been a laugh.

"Come on. The medbay... The elevator's not working. Is there a medpack?" Ben was rambling, panicking now that the action was over, shifting his weight in preparation to help his mother up, then thinking better of it.

Brell intervened, nonchalantly stepping over the dead assassin on the floor. "I have bacta patches. There should be a first aid kit in the hall. Let me see how bad it is."

The other guard was making a report into his comm. There were sounds of movement in the hall outside. Warily, reluctantly, Ben stepped away from his mother and put himself against the wall, making space. Rey seemed primarily interested in her kill, and Leia was busy presenting herself as a model of composure and serenity while she was fussed over and her bedroom flooded with soldiers.

When the loudest question in the room changed from "is she alright?" to "how did it happen?" Brell turned to her young companion.

"Erin, was your bodycam running?"

"Yes, ma'am."

.

Everyone on the base wanted to see with their own eyes how the monstrous Kylo Ren had rushed to the General's rescue. Apparently word of mouth was not convincing enough. Ben couldn't blame them for doubting him, and in the end, he was glad of the existence of the recording. Without it, he would likely not have been allowed anywhere near Leia during her recovery.

Under the wary eyes of multiple guards, he sat with her on the infirmary bed and brushed her hair.

"I didn't ask..." she spoke softly, but with a dry frankness that was both old and new. A lifetime of politics had made her a master of expressing herself in tone of voice, regardless of the words themselves. "Were you hurt in the fight?" In this instance, her voice and posture communicated gratefulness and relief, not for being rescued, but for the chance to be close to him again. With it, there was an acknowledgment of the controversy involved, and a callous dismissal of it. Some things hadn't changed.

"No," he responded to her spoken question, letting the rest sink down into the hollows of his chest.

"And Rey?"

"She's fine. Her leg is sore."

"I'm sure the medics gave her a scolding."

"She saved your life," Ben said unnecessarily.

"So did you."

To that, he said nothing.

"What did Han say when you met him?"

"What?" He thought he must have heard her wrong, or that she was remembering a dream.

"On Starkiller Base."

He would have preferred a dream. "He told me to come home."

"Ah," she said. "Well, here you are."

"Mother..."

"Shh. Don't you dare say you're sorry."

He kept his mouth shut. He brushed her hair.

.

Without a Force-using assassin nipping at their heels, the base was free to organize at full capacity. They broke through the First Order's lines with Ben and Rey forging the way. It was a clean and decisive battle, ending with the enemy's surrender and more captives than casualties. It wasn't until he stood at ease after the fight that Ben felt the weight of what he had done. Although Snoke's death had been months ago, only now, at last, did the Resistance have nothing to resist.

And yet, when wounds were tended and the clean-up underway, he found himself being shuffled right back to Ahch-To.

"There's only so far you can bend the council before they snap back and hit you in the face." Leia had said at the scene of his departure, doing nothing to hide her disapproval of the arrangement. "They're almost as stubborn as I am."

"I don't deserve their forgiveness." It was an odd position he found himself in, trying to sooth his mother's temper. "I don't deserve yours."

"I don't ever want to hear you say that again."

Her ferocity touched him, but he couldn't make that promise. Instead he said nothing, and he didn't flinch when Leia hugged him goodbye.

The voyage seemed faster on the way back. Perhaps it was that, this time, he didn't particularly want to go. Perhaps it was that his mind was too preoccupied to worry about where he was. Perhaps it was simply that Rey was with him.

She had made a small scene over it, guaranteeing that she had a crowd when she declared to Leia that if Ben was still exiled, than so was she. Leia had shown no surprise at this. Ben wondered if the two had planned it in advance. Either way, the point was made and the rumors spread. The galaxy's hero deemed Ben's exile so unjust that she would subject herself to the same until the sentence was revoked.

It took a long time before Ben could process how he felt about the gesture. However much he balked at the idea of dragging her down, it was Rey's choice and she took a fiery joy in the defiance. Ben could hardly complain about her company, and their training with Luke would continue. It helped ease his mind to consider the practicality of the arrangement.

When their transport touched down on the green mountainside of Ahch-To, it was like waking up. The days of combat and politics felt unreal, the crowded military base like a dream. It was as if he hadn't been there at all, had perhaps only heard the story secondhand, or watched it on a holovid. Ahch-To was real and solid and cold and wet. When his boots sunk into soggy grass, it felt as if he had never left.

Luke and Chewie were waiting to welcome them back. There had been calls made. They were kept informed.

Luke was smiling.

He accepted Rey's hug when she bounded up to him, and then he came to meet Ben. They looked at each other for a while, as Luke searched for words and found none. Finally, he took Ben by the arm and pulled him into a stiff hug.

Never had Ben been particularly fond of hugs. Not, at least, when he was on the receiving end. He had reminded his family of this with persistence and exasperation throughout his childhood. Even Rey knew to opt for other displays of affection unless he was the one to initiate the embrace.

If Luke and his mother were going to keep this up, though, he supposed he would have to get used to it.

Chewbacca, at least, did not take a turn, but warbled a 'welcome home' that made Ben feel like weeping.

It was months still before the Republic court came to a decision. Ben tried not to be bitter. The chaos of wartime was only surpassed by the chaos that followed it. Rey suffered under her decision, torn between helping her friends and upholding her self-imposed exile—and being with Ben—consistantly frustrated that she couldn't do both. It was Ben who had to tell her to go, well aware of the irony, reminding her that he had survived her absence on Rulah and that it was something he was better off getting used to in any case. She had kissed him and said that was all well and good, but she didn't want to be without him.

In the end, she stayed. If the Republic needed her badly enough, she said, they could lift the exile on both of them. They meditated, they sparred, they made love, all in the dreamlike, sea-scented mists of Ahch-To, until at last the newly reordered Republic ran out of more important matters to discuss, and Ben, who had grown comfortable in the rustic island lifestyle, was uprooted and summoned before the court.

It was not an affair he cared to remember, although his mother put in her best effort to steer it away from the tone of a public shaming. As his mother, she had no official sway over the ruling, but she had respect, and so did Rey.

Rey, perhaps, moreso than her.

There were those who argued that while Rey was a keen warrior and a hero, it was her very kindness and compassion that made her unsuited for the case. There were those who argued that the assassination attempt had been a fraud—a ploy arranged by Ben to create the false appearance of redemption. There were many who frowned and looked sidelong at Rey's relationship with him, for their displays at Rulah had ensured that it was no secret.

But the fact remained that Ben had risked his life against the First Order not one but three times—in destroying Snoke, in rescuing Leia, and in the final siege—and there were more in the court who, in the revitalizing wake of victory, were inclined to extend their desire for healing to the most direct victim of Snoke's machinations.

Ben was asked to make a statement confirming his renouncement of the First Order and reaffirming the claim that Snoke had manipulated and tortured him from birth. The words felt mechanical. They were no more than facts of his life, of his past, and he had already shed his tears for them.

The court ruled in favor of pardon.

.

There was a park adjacent to the court tower, to which Rey and Ben escaped as soon as they were able. The park was on an artificial platform, a wide bridge that arched gently between their tower and the next one over, but a layer of earth and grass and a border of trees created the illusion of a natural meadow. Some sort of bird or insect or similar was making a pleasant chirping sound from the trees, and there was the lazy burble of fountains.

Rey was a vision in the sunlight, stepping with a predator's grace, craning her neck to see every inch of green, and all the while holding tight to his hand. Her smile had been a fragile thing, weary after the fear and frustration of the court, but now it blossomed without restraint.

The grass was soft and springy beneath his feet, comfortable to walk on, no doubt cultivated for that quality. The fountains, he noted, were built into the sides of the bridge, visible through breaks in the tree line. Ahead, at the midpoint of the park, was a place where the trees fanned out into a neatly maintained mimicry of woodland. When they reached it, Rey slipped eagerly between two smooth-barked trunks, Ben ducked under a branch to follow, and they emerged into a riot of color. The trees had opened up into a sun-dappled clearing, and the clearing was littered with clusters of flowers.

Rey laughed at the sight. “We dreamed this." She let go of Ben's hand at last and stepped out into the open, finding and claiming the softest patch of grass to sit on. She was radiant.

Mystified, Ben followed. When he sat, bracing himself with a hand, the soft petals of a flower curled under his palm. Finding the stem by feel, he plucked it. "Rey, turn around." She squinted at him, then saw the flower and caught on, putting her back to him and sitting still while he straightened her hair with his fingers. "What color?"

"All of them," she answered, so he wove her hair out in a tapered braid and spangled it from top to bottom in flowers. When he was done, she informed him that it was his turn, and smiled at his dubious look. Scooting behind him, she tied his hair back with a cord twisted from blades of grass. He felt his cheeks heat foolishly as she tucked flowers into the tie and behind his too-big ears, but he let her have her fun without complaint.

"There," she said when she was done, and brushed her hands together in a show of satisfaction. He twisted about to look at her just for the pleasure of seeing her face.

"I'll teach you how to braid," he promised.

"Alright, but later,” Rey said. “It's perfect the way it is."


	14. [closing note and poem]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had planned two more parts for this (with timeskips between) but as I failed to get them written before TLJ and I'm a stickler for canon compliance, I would prefer to save my ideas for another fic.
> 
> Here, instead, is the original poem which the chapter titles would have eventually formed. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again.

_In ruins he left,_  
_Hands clasped in a storm,_  
_On the rain-soaked shore,_  
_One candle._  
_To light our way,_  
_To cast off doubt,_  
_one thousand shining stars_  
_and one lone candle._

_If you bend for me,_  
_If I break for you,_  
_If we gather fallen stars,_  
_Would you meet me in the halfway place_  
_with one lone candle?_

_If I live for you,_  
_If you love for me,_  
_If the sun breaks through the clouds,_  
_I would hold your hand while the world ends._  
_In candlelight, I would give to you my heart._

_If you stand by me_  
_And if I believe_  
_In a dream of better days_  
_When the wounds are healed and the darkness fades,_  
_When the storm winds die,_  
_Then I, for you_  
_Will light one thousand candles_  
_To fill the space between the stars._


End file.
